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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lane3 who wrote (72302)	6/15/2008 9:22:11 AM
From: Travis_Bickle	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 542054

"The clamor for habeas corpus seems flip to me. I don't see any analysis of how it would work." I think the way it would work is the detainee's lawyer and the government's lawyer appear before a federal judge, and the government lawyer shows the judge that the government has probable cause to believe that the detainee is guilty of a crime, and the judge says "Okay you can keep him locked up" and then everybody goes home and fires up the grill and cooks some nice steaks. I don't see how that is an impossible burden for the government.

To: Lane3 who wrote (72302)	6/15/2008 11:37:33 AM
From: Rambi	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 542054

Somewhere in my reading yesterday, I came across the fact that many (my memory says a couple of hundred, but not sure) GITMO detainees are waiting for release, but no countries will take them.

To: Lane3 who wrote (72302)	6/15/2008 10:18:42 PM
From: Cogito	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 542054

>>I didn't think you could get a co-conspirator to testify in court against his fellows no matter what you did to or for him. It seems utterly unfeasible to me. And even if you could, how credible would he be? Now, perhaps American juries would not look too closely at whether the witness is credible and just take the opportunity to convict everyone tried, which cuts the legs out from under the habeas corpus right. Then, I suppose, we'd have a movement to free all the unjustly convicted rather than the unjustly held without trial.<< Karen - We got Nazi SS officers, even some who started out as complete fanatics and hard cases, to give us all kinds of good information in WWII, without ever torturing one of them. In general, It is very common for co-conspirators to testify against one another. Happens all the time in organized crime cases, drug rings, etc. If you're suggesting that it will never happen in the case of terrorists, because somehow they are completely different from all other types of criminals we have every had to deal with, then I would just want to know why you think so. They may be dedicated fanatics, but they are still human. Humans respond to certain kinds of treatment and certain kinds of interrogation techniques. Torture, it turns out, doesn't generally yield reliable information. I don't think that just dropping all the terrorists into our legal system will make everything OK. I also don't think we need to reinvent the wheel with regard to rules of evidence, etc., just because we're dealing with particularly scary people. - Allen

To: Lane3 who wrote (72302)	6/16/2008 5:54:24 PM
From: spiral3	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 542054

Generally, I'm challenging the notion that we can just plunk terrorists into our criminal justice system and all will be well. June 13, 9:10 AM, 2008 A Setback for the State of Exception By Scott Horton Is a radical shake-up of the nation’s legal process necessary? Does the criminal justice process not in fact already have the tools necessary to cope with such cases? I recently attended a RAND Corporation function in Santa Monica in which a group of federal judges, two of them George Bush appointees, spoke to that question. They were all agreed that the necessary tools were already present. To the extent the counterterrorism trials they presided over had not gone smoothly, the judges were united in blame allocation: they placed it squarely on the shoulders of the Bush Justice Department, charging it had consistently hyped and politicized the cases and brought charges which plainly were not sustained by any evidence. A powerful case against the idea of a national security court is also made in a paper prepared by lawyers Richard B. Zabel and James J. Benjamin, Jr. entitled “In Pursuit of Justice: Prosecuting Terrorism in the Federal Courts.”(2 MB PDF). humanrightsfirst.info Anyone looking for an introduction to the issues which the administration will be raising, minus the chicken-with-head-chopped-off breathlessness with which they will be presented, can profit greatly from an investment of several hours in this report. harpers.org