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Friday, September 15, 2006

The Detainees

Can we be just during a war? Do “enemy combatants” have rights? Why is the Republican Party spilt over this issue? Why are Democrats not speaking up?

Read the articles (NYTIMES) (NYPOST) and leave a comment.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

christine mullen

i understand the whole geneva convention and what this country stands for. But i feel once you turn your back on us and join a party that is against us. That we have every right to turn our back on you and snatch the rights you once had.If you dont even respect our country. why should our countries rights apply to you.At this piont i dont think there is a fair way to do things. They have taken all the fairness that they would have been given when they decided to invade our country

W Brown said...

Christine- have we been invaded by these "accussed terrorists"? Do we as the United States have the power to give and take away rights?

John - I think you need to explain yourself further. Who is not playing fair according to the articles?

Mighty Mojo said...

I agree with John, certainly not in his thinking that terrorists should be given no rights whatsoever! but in his thinking that, if we want to call ourselves "civilized" and others barbaric, we must act like it. What this country does to accused terrorists is most certainly barbaric as well as disgusting and a few other things not to be said on this particular blog, and I agree also with Carolina when she says that “if we want people to treat us fairly, we must be fair in return."
We cannot demand that the people in Afghanistan or the people in Iraq not harm our soldiers or the prisoners of war that they have captured, we cannot even ask that their heads not be lopped off on public television, when we have hundreds of their people, many of them innocent, being tortured in our prison camps right now. At this second there are men and women being tortured to death in Guantanamo. Right now people are dying and the Geneva Conventions, laid out by the UN (the United States included) to protect all prisoners of war, are being defied. Right now the world is changing. Right now we are losing the right to call ourselves civilized human beings, many people have already lost the right, in my eyes, to call themselves human beings at all and, right now, we are giving ourselves to chaos.

W Brown said...

Anything after this is late

Anonymous said...

We definitely don't have a right to override the Geneva Convention! And in the US we have laws to protect the few rights we give Prisoners of War (which is why our prisoners are in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba).


And lets say we decide to throw the GC (geneva convention) out of the window. We find 20 men that are 'suspected terrorists', but we have absoloutly little or no evidence to support that. So we torture them half to death and in the end, some of those poor men had absoloutly nothing to do with it. Tell me then, is it fair to not go by the Geneva Convention? And if we get rid of it, and show no mercy, who's to say the 'terrorists' won't do the same thing?

Anonymous said...

I wonder though how relevant the geneva convention is and how many people actually follow it. I agree with how Carolina said that it's a great way to ensure our soldiers safety but in this day in time we have to be realistic and accept the fact that sometimes it isn't followed. Also I remember how in class we said that it can be interpreted in different ways, which can create loopholes and allow the torture of soldiers becaues of the way it was interpreted. Does that make it right? No it doesn't, but war also isn't fair. I think the bigger question is do we want to be the good guys and not torture the soldiers we capture, while ours could possible be tortured?

Anonymous said...

The geneva convention is something apart of the country that is very important. The geneva convention is something that secures our soldiers lives. Another thing is that why are the democrats stay quiet? Everyone should have the same ammount of equal rights for the terrorist.