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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (126009)	3/12/2004 3:53:20 PM
From: Jacob Snyder	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

<What was the benefit to the US in his death? > I agree with you, and pointed it out myself, that there is no benefit to the U.S., in an extra-judicial murder of detainees. He now becomes a martyr, a focus for further incitement of hatred toward America and Israel. Alive, we could have held a show trial, and gotten a lot of good propaganda out of a very public airing of all Abbas's crimes. Instead, the end result of this, will be more dead Americans, and peace pushed further into the future. I doubt there was any direct order given, to kill him. Just as I doubt Bush or Rumsfeld directly gave orders to kill the Bagram prisoners, or put all those Taliban in containers. In any organization, and especially in any army operating in a war zone, the lower-level people don't always do exactly what the upper-level decision-makers tell them to do. But, when rules are broken, there has to be consequences for the rule-breakers. If there aren't, then the breakdown of discipline spreads. When the decision-makers know this is happening, and do nothing to punish the rule-breakers, it is a dead certainty, the violations will continue. Abbas is not the first prisoner to die in our custody, and (if nobody is punished for it) he won't be the last. What was the motive? The hatred of enemies, which I read daily, on this thread and in the words of all our leaders. This hatred is taught, reinforced, and endlessly justified, to all of us. This hatred becomes a reflex, poorly targeted. It is a hatred which ignores ultimate consequences, ignores justice, ignores laws. You see it in every war, unless you close your eyes to it.

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (126009)	3/12/2004 5:40:29 PM
From: Bilow	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Hi Nadine Carroll; Re: "Jacob, when any prosecutor looks at a case, he has to put together a story: means, method, motive and opportunity. Now clearly a jailer has method and opportunity to kill a celebrity prisoner, but you do need to ask about motive. What was the benefit to the US in his death? What was the risk to the US in his life, considering he was safely in jail?" The motives are clear: (a) In the absence of a death penalty, the convenient deaths of prisoners will put more fear into the enemy. (b) Prisoners can eventually be released alive, but corpses, once dead, stay that way. (Important exception: Jesus.) The French had no motives for killing all those Algerian prisoners, many of them celebrities of a sort, as has been admitted to in the autobiography by the man who did it (bragging even). If you need to have the reasons for executing prisoners illegally (in a democracy), you can begin by reading his explanations. A link to the book is here: #reply-19676916 The short form argument for illegally executing prisoners is that "this is necessary in a war on terror." As Martha Stewart would say, "it is a good thing", and to hell with the legal details. By the way, your argument is one that is used by the people who deny the Holocaust. What reason would the Germans have for killing people who they already had in concentration camps? -- Carl