Protecting family at any cost and the-rules-be-damned (the scenario Kurt suggests above) has consequences at a local and societal level. Especially when each vigilante has their own sense of right and wrong and of being right and wronged.

very well said. thank you.

Protecting family at any cost and the-rules-be-damned (the scenario Kurt suggests above) has consequences at a local and societal level. Especially when each vigilante has their own sense of right and wrong and of being right and wronged.

Let’s take an hypothetical example in a village in Afghanistan:
The Taliban rapes a little girl–let’s say she is about 10 years old.
The country is then liberated by a foreign army which patrols this village as a peace keeper.

The mother of this little girl gives her up to a local man in exchange for his goats.
The man returns a little while later, and in a public display of anger demands his goats back, because this girl is not a virgin (how he learns this and what his motivations for finding out can be left out of this little hypothetical).
The mother wants to keep the goats, and flatly refuses to undo the exchange.
The man retaliates right there, and without warning swings an axe and cuts the little girl’s head off.
The Peace Force sees the man swinging an axe in public, and shoots the man dead.

Two dead bodies in the marketplace.

Aside from the dead little girl, who is the aggrieved person in this scenario?
Who has committed a crime? Who has committed an act of war/terror? Whom was protected?

Do local customs allow a man to be judge, jury and executioner in Afghanistan?
Do rules of war allow the peacekeeping force to shoot on site?

It’s just a law and not an international treaty?

How did they nail Pinochet?

Because Britain has different laws?

And an ironclad extradition treaty with Spain?

And if there is a s.o.l. in the U.S. does this just mean that they better watch their back when they go overseas?

Do the militants in Iraq follow the guidelines set forth by the Geneva Convention?.

how exactly does the answer to this question change, or indeed have any bearing on our decision to torture suspects?

Since the Geneva Conventions doesn’t apply to this war bu the way it is being waged, we need to find and define new rules of war, so soldiers know how to respond to whatever situation may arise

of course the geneva conventions still apply. have you read them? i read them (and the commentaries) in the winter of 2002, which is why i knew rumsfeld and bush were full of shit when they said the geneva conventions don’t apply. in fact, they explicitly apply regardless of the actions of our enemies.

one of the provisions of the conventions is that as a high contracting party we are required to teach members of the armed services about them. so there should be no problem with soldiers knowing how to respond.

more importantly, putting aside the legal and moral issues for a moment, how do you think using torture makes the citizens of our country safer and not less safe?

If you kill enough people or lock up enough people, you might nab some of the people you are after (terrorists). However, in your quest to prevent terror you have also locked up innocents, with no mechanism for the innocent people to seek a remedy (based on the current Bush system). Not only are they all guilty until proved innocent, they have no mechanism to prove their innocence nor a chance to prove the government is malicious.
As you know, under the current system, Bush’s government does not have to prove its case that a terrorist is a terrorist.

Think about all the other ways we could use this process to protect Americans:

How could we have protected America from the ravages of Wall Street?
Simple. We should have put into prison all the investment bankers and all the mortgage brokers before this happened. Perhaps all the hedge fund owners and all the day traders, too.

Now that the investment banks and mortgage brokers have disappeared like a bunch of Twin Towers and swallowed up in the dust cloud $billions and $billions of our net worth and retirement savings, we should go after the remaining workers in these trades.

Take away their cell phone and crackberries. Lock them all up until we find the culprits.

Or

We could use human intelligence and more government oversight to prevent catastrophes–difficult to find in this current administration, but worthy goals nevertheless.
and follow the rules of law to bring the bad actors to justice.

Bush was criticized rightly for failing to connect the dots pre-9/11.

Now he criticized rightly for connecting the wrong dots after 9/11.

There was no Saddam Hussein/NYC World Trade Center connection.

At least 50% of the prisoners in Gitmo are not terrorists or combatants.

Torture does not provide valid intelligence. Torture provides only fake confessions used to perpetuate the myth that the torturing nation is capturing true ‘bad guys.’

And once again, who is the “state-sponsored individuals?” What sovereign state is doing this? If you have special information on which nation is sponsoring these actions, then you must be planning to lead the attack against them yourself.

So we are going to fight a ‘conflict’ with a bunch of FBI, LAPD, NYPD, and local authorities? Those police are going to stop state-sponsored individuals from coming into our country and leveling our buildings. The thing about police is…they are so over-stretched, they respond after the event has occured, doesn’t even matter what the event is. If you have any police friends, go talk to them, they will tell you that very phrase. Also, do you think the police have the ability to deal with a ‘dirty nuke, or God forbid some biological agent? What you are saying is insanity at best. Investigations take a very long time, and in this sue-happy society, they take even longer. If a policy like this were ever enacted, again America would fail to exist.

I appreciate your sentiment, and I am a Catholic, which I will admit puts me at odds sometimes with their beliefs in war and capitol punishment. However, I am not going to sit in a church pew for the rest of my life without my kids, or wife because I failed to act.

Let me ask you a question, and this can relate to the current Israeli conflict. You and your family are living peacefully in your home when someone just randomly drives by a shoots your house a few times. Then it starts happening more and more and goes on for a period of months. Are you going to just sit there and take it? No, you will probably call the police, right? Another element, what happens if you find out who is doing it, but can’t prove it to the police, what do you do then? Are you simply going to turn the other cheek and let the shooting continue?

The country of “Terrorism?” Where is that country on the map? Terror is a tactic not a sovereign nation. To fight terror the best tactic is solid police work. Police. Not soldiers. Police who are trained in investigations, not soldiers who are trained to destroy.

Police.