Holder: US can legally kill Americans in terror groups

[Razgovory]

No, you retard, I was actually making the same argument you were making just a few posts back.  They are illegal combatants, not entitled to the Constitutional protection due to being combatants, not entitled to geneva protections due to being unprotected combatants as defined under the geneva conventions.

The only thing they are entitled to is a "competent military tribunal", as defined by the geneva convention, to determine if they are legal or illegal combatants.  Once determining that they are illegal combatants we should hang them from the neck until dead.

This has always been my position, and I agrued this position vehemently over the years, especially with JR.  And I was critical of Bush for deciding to bring some of them on trial because he believed we had enough evidence to convict in court.  It is simply not a just system if you change the way you treat them simply based on how much evidence you have.

That wasn't my argument.

It's trying to have it both ways.  They are either enemy combatants or criminals.  You can't be both.

That was my argument.  Are there even "Constitutional protection due to being combatants"(sic) in the first place?

[The Minsky Moment]

No, you retard, I was actually making the same argument you were making just a few posts back.  They are illegal combatants, not entitled to the Constitutional protection due to being combatants, not entitled to geneva protections due to being unprotected combatants as defined under the geneva conventions.

The only thing they are entitled to is a "competent military tribunal", as defined by the geneva convention, to determine if they are legal or illegal combatants.  Once determining that they are illegal combatants we should hang them from the neck until dead.

That's the have your cake and eat it too concept that the prior administration initially advanced, but eventually had to abandon after a fairly conservative Supreme Court ruled against them at every turn.

The notion that there is some status a person in custody can have that can permit the government to summarily execute them without further inquiry beyond whether they qualify as a Geneva Article 4 POW is logically absurd, bereft of any support in domestic law or precedent or international norms, and is wholly repugnant to the very notion of a government of limited powers acting under the rule of law.  A bad guy is either a Prisoner of War as defined by Geneva and must be treated in accordance with the convention, or they are an outlaw.  And if they are an outlaw in the custody of the United States government, the constitution unequivocally prohibits deprivation of life or liberty without due process.   There is no room for a magic third category of persons who (to paraphrase Dred Scott) have no rights which the authorities are bound to respect.

Of course, even that inquiry is unnecessary beacuse the Court correctly held that Common Article 3 applies to captured Al Qaeda.  Since the "competent military tribunal" in Geneva Article 5 only relates to determination of status under Article 4, a negative determination does not cut off all further rights of the detainee but merely denies PoW status while at the same time activating Article 3's requirements.  And happily, Article 3's requirement of "judgment pronounced by a regularly constituted court affording all the judicial guarantees which are recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples" nicely dovetails with the Fifth Amendment's due process guarantee.

[Admiral Yi]

If all that is true Joan, why are all the corpuses in Gitmo not being habeused?

[The Minsky Moment]

If all that is true Joan, why are all the corpuses in Gitmo not being habeused?

Supposedly because it takes time to evaluate all the cases and figure out how they are to be disposed.
The reality is that like the previous admin they have been buying time and winking and nodding at the Constitution.

[Admiral Yi]

Supposedly because it takes time to evaluate all the cases and figure out how they are to be disposed.
The reality is that like the previous admin they have been buying time and winking and nodding at the Constitution.

But isn't that the whole point of habeus corpus--fish or cut bait?

[The Minsky Moment]

But isn't that the whole point of habeus corpus--fish or cut bait?

A lot of detainees brought habeas petitions after the Supreme Court ruled in 2008 that they could.  Some have been granted, but most not.  The usual outcome is that the court rejects the petition on the ground that the government has sufficient evidence that the detainees are al-Qaeda or Taliban and based on the Supreme Court's ruling in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld that the Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF) authorizes "detention of individuals falling into the limited category we are considering, for the duration of the particular conflict in which they were captured" as a "fundamental and accepted an incident to war."