Common Article III is, in fact, vague.

[MrCoffee]

This is going to get me into all kinds of trouble, but Common Article III of the Geneva Conventions is, in fact, vague.

It's MEANT to be vague. The intent of the Article is to protect the integrity of "Persons taking no active part in the hostilities, including members of armed forces who have laid down their arms and those placed ' hors de combat ' by sickness, wounds, detention, or any other cause"

The Article protects those parties by prohibiting "violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment and torture; taking of hostages; outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment;and the passing of sentences and the carrying out of executions without previous judgment pronounced by a regularly constituted court, affording all the judicial guarantees which are recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples.

That's all kinds of vague. "outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment" AS WELL IT SHOULD BE. The basic premise of the Article is that there are some things civilized peoples just don't do.

[americanstranger]

1. Exactly.

I read somewhere yesterday (I wish I could remember where!) that it was purposely written that way - without specifics, so unscrupulous regimes wouldn't read it and just do whatever it didn't mention.

Bush wants a list of stuff he can't do, so they can just go ahead and do different stuff.

They want to 'clarify' the article to death.

- as

[pinto]

2. It *assumes* a set of standards, not a government looking for loopholes.

I hope the Republicans (who hold the cards in Congress) maintain their opposition to this maneuver. :thumbsup:

[MrCoffee]

7. IMHO, the Repub schism over this is way more interesting than

Chimpy throwing feces at David Gregory.

[pinto]

21. Yeah, schism is a good tag here. We'll see what happens. It's interesting,

politically. In the bigger picture, though, this is a dangerous rereading of the Geneva Conventions, imo. Mr. Gregory carried a common worry to the press conference today. Bad precedent to be toying with.

[MrCoffee]

22. True, true and true.

It's one thing to snipe at a WH reporter (i'd love to do some of that myself). It's another thing to attempt to defend these reprehensible practices as legitimate intelligence gathering tools.

[2008]

45. LOL (literally)

"way more interesting than Chimpy throwing feces at David Gregory"

thanks

[POAS]

3. To much specificity would

allow for methods to be developed that fall outside the specifications of the article.

"I didn't pull out his finger nails, I just smashed them and they fell out on their own"

[MrCoffee]

12. Yes...but the rubber meets the road when you try to enforce it.

Which is what SCOTUS did in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld. Now Congress has the unenviable task of deciding what the hell Common Article III acutally means.

[Lisa]

4. if Snippy needs a specific sentence in there ...

... something along the lines of "Don't smear prisoners with filth and make them form naked human pyramids -- and this means YOU, George W. Bush" ... he really is clueless, isn't he!

[POAS]

6. And he would use a signing statement to

deny that the law applies to him anyway.

[ashling]

5. No problem here

That's all kinds of vague. "outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment" AS WELL IT SHOULD BE. The basic premise of the Article is that there are some things civilized peoples just don't do.


I was told in law school that when you start specifying things you had damn well better specify everything, or you have, in fact specified nothing.

[MrCoffee]

9. that's what i learned in my international law course.

[MADem]

8. I don't see the vagueness as a bad thing, actually.

Look, if all you have for shelter is a cave with a dirt floor, then a cave is appropriate to shelter your POWs. But if you put your prisoners in a cave while you live in air conditioned luxury, that is NOT appropriate. If all you have to eat is barley and oatmeal, that's a decent meal if the option is starving. If you're eating high on the hog while your POWs are eating watery barley, that's NOT appropriate.

The 'vague' aspect allows for wiggle room due to combat considerations. If the requirements were spelled out, and rigorous, then you'd find people killing combatants "in battle" rather than going to the trouble of taking prisoners and having to deal with twitchy rules.

[lapfog_1]

17. Much like our Marines have been doing in Iraq

killing the wounded.

[Kagemusha]

10. It's not VAGUE. It's BROAD.

As in, it bans all sorts of really evil, nasty things without providing narrow loopholes for torturers and evil men in general.

[Swamp Rat]

13. Thank you!

They are just playing word games again, though, this time the stakes are higher: Bushler&Co will face war crimes prosecution.

[Kagemusha]

15. Tell all your friends! Not vague, broad!!

It's simple, it's sensible, it works. There's no need for the usual long discussion about what words mean. Everyone knows what broad means, and it doesn't mean vague!

[MrCoffee]

16. Technically, it's vague

A law is vague if a person of reasonable intelligence must necessarily guess at the meaning of the law or how the law is to be applied.

A law is overbroad if, in an attempt to regulate behavior deserving of regulation, it encompasses behavior that should not be regulated in the first place.

Common Article III is vague in that there's no way anyone can tell what subclause 3 means, or how it should be applied.

[Swamp Rat]

18. "if a person of reasonable intelligence"

Joe Sixpack is NOT "of reasonable intelligence." :)

[MrCoffee]

19. It's an objective standard

Not what did you actually know, but what should you (the reasonable man) have known.

[Swamp Rat]

23. Nothing is objective

:D

But I do understand what you mean, and do not necessarily disagree.

My focus is on those who do not understand, who have been affected by behavior modification over the last 25 years.

[MrCoffee]

25. The fact that this thread earned 3 Swamp Rat pics is reward enough.

[Swamp Rat]

28. LOL!

Flattery got you 4. :D

[Kagemusha]

29. I'm sorry, why does my saying broad have to mean "overbroad"?

I certainly didn't say overbroad.

And I simply, fundamentally and vehemently disagree with you that there's no way anyone can tell what subclause 3 means or how it should be applied absent of intent to do the things plainly banned by subclause 3 and wanting to argue the laws and supreme court rulings indicating subclause 3 should and must be enforced by US criminal law, cannot and should not be applied because well, we want to wish the law away.

The people who want to "narrowly define" subclause 3 want to do so because they want to violate the plain meaning of the language, not because they don't know what the language means, and is supposed to mean.

Edit: Clarifying - I don't think a reasonable person who's not being paid by the government to make stuff up could interpret the section as vague. I think intelligent, learned people arguing it is vague do so only out of grievous contempt for the well known history of WWII war crimes (such as the Nuremburg trials) which put the section in vivid context in the shadow of the Holocaust.

[MrCoffee]

30. My bad, i assumed you meant broad in the legal sense.

Vagueness and overbreadth are constitutional challenges going to the text of laws as they are drafted. Subclause 3 is vague in the legal sense in that it is objectively necessary to guess as to what conduct is prohibited. But the Article is drafted that way. It's meant to be vague. Ratification by the signatories allows some interpretation by all the parties as to how they read it. All countries do that with all treaties.

I'm not arguing that we should narrowly define subclause 3, or any part of the Article. I'm sorry if you interpreted my OP that way. I was trying to point out that * totally fails to understand the basic meaning of the Article.

[Kagemusha]

36. No problem - it's just, calling it broad, has plain political value

Let me phrase it better - not vaguely written, but written broadly, to encompass a wide variety of evils. A pity but, lawyerly definitions don't sell well with the public. So, a sharp soundbyte works.

This is just my suggestion for one.

[MrCoffee]

38. I absolutely agree with you. The whole point of the Article is acceptance

by the international community. It must be written broadly (and vaguely :-)) in order to be signed and ratified by the world.

[angstlessk]

11. We have seen bush* use specification before..."It does not say I cannot...

...cut of his right arm". bush* has used specification against his critics before. So uless EVERY POSSIBLE SCENARIO CAN BE SPECIFIED BUSH WILL DO WHAT EVER IS LEFT OUT! :grr:

[leveymg]

14. I hope * does get his "clarification" passed. That will trigger

mandatory collective enforcement action under the UN Convention Against Torture (CAT). All states must act to enforce the Convention whenever any state can not or will not enforce violations of the CAT within its own territory.

Furthermore, any Members of the US Congress who voted to limit the applicability of Common Article III of the Geneva Convention, CAT or the Genocide Treaty would also be subject to prosecution as war criminals.

After everything that's happened, the U.S. Army isn't going to block the path to the Hague.

[MrCoffee]

26. Yeah, like that's ever going to happen.

And even if we slip into some alternate reality, and it does happen, what on earth makes you think the 82nd Airborne wouldn't be picking tulips?

[leveymg]

47. Who would've thought that the CIA and JCS would do this, too?

On March 30, 2003, just ten days after after the start of a massive U.S. military occupation of Iraq, the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency ordered the agency's Inspector General to refer the Plame outing to the Justice Department for prosecution. In the following months, as it became clear that there were no substantial stocks of WMD in Iraq, and that an enormous deception had taken place, the Joint Chiefs of Staff launched their own investigation. That investigation was vigorously opposed by the White House and Secretary Rumsfeld.

In July 2005, the FBI arrested Larry Franklin, a reserve Air Force officer assigned to the Office of Special Plans (OSP), a unit set up within the Pentagon to bypass the Defense Intelligence Agency's normal channels of intelligence gathering, analysis and dissemination related to South Asia and the Middle East. Acting as a cooperating witness prior to his arrest, the investigation of Col. Franklin revealed a network of Israeli espionage and American conspirators who had fed false intelligence about Iraq and Iran to the Office of the Vice President (OVP) that supported the policy decision already made when the Bush-Cheney Administration came into office to launch military attacks on Iraq and Iran.

Simultaneously, as the occupation of Iraq bogged down into an increasingly bloody quagmire that revealed American military vulnerabilities, the JCS notified the White House that it did not find Iran war plans put forward to be legal, workable or in the national interest.

That's the context, my friend, that the U.S. military would not block domestic and international prosecution of figures in the Administration for war crimes and other offenses related to the invasion and occupation of Iraq.

[leveymg]

48. The AIPAC-OSP-Likud-INC cabal rolled up

Robert Dreyfuss in The Nation, July 7, 2003: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20030707/dreyfuss

According to current and former US intelligence analysts and government officials, the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans funneled information, unchallenged, from Ahmad Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress (INC) to Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, who in turn passed it on to the White House, suggesting that Iraqis would welcome the American invaders. The Office of Special Plans is led by Abram Shulsky, a hawkish neoconservative ideologue who got his start in politics working alongside Elliott Abrams in Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson's office in the 1970s. It was set up in fall 2001 as a two-man shop, but it burgeoned into an eighteen-member nerve center of the Pentagon's effort to distort intelligence about Iraq's WMDs and terrorist connections. A great deal of the bad information produced by Shulsky's office, which found its way into speeches by Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and George W. Bush, came from Chalabi's INC. Since the INC itself was sustained by its neocon allies in Washington, including the shadow "Central Command" at the American Enterprise Institute, it stands as perhaps the ultimate example of circular reasoning.

"The same unit that fed Chalabi's intelligence on WMD to Rumsfeld was also feeding him Chalabi's stuff on the prospects for postwar Iraq," said a leading US government expert on the Middle East. Says a former US ambassador with strong links to the CIA: "There was certainly information coming from the Iraqi exile community, including Chalabi--who was detested by the CIA and by the State Department--saying, 'They will welcome you with open arms.'" Rumsfeld's willingness to accept that view led him to contradict the Chief of Staff of the US Army, who predicted that it would take hundreds of thousands of troops to control Iraq after the fall of Baghdad, a view that seems prescient today.

According to the former official, also feeding information to the Office of Special Plans was a secret, rump unit established last year in the office of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israel. This unit, which paralleled Shulsky's--and which has not previously been reported--prepared intelligence reports on Iraq in English (not Hebrew) and forwarded them to the Office of Special Plans. It was created in Sharon's office, not inside Israel's Mossad intelligence service, because the Mossad--which prides itself on extreme professionalism--had views closer to the CIA's, not the Pentagon's, on Iraq. This secretive unit, and not the Mossad, may well have been the source of the forged documents purporting to show that Iraq tried to purchase yellowcake uranium for weapons from Niger in West Africa, according to the former official.

The catastrophic result of the belief that it would be easy to pacify postwar Iraq and to create a quisling government in Baghdad, a view that was codified as dogma by the White House, is unfolding daily in Iraq.

[DoYouEverWonder]

20. That's why the Chimp wants everyone to believe it is

because this meme will be the basis of his defense in court.

[rug]

24. So is the Fourth Amendment.

[MrCoffee]

27. Darn tootin'.

[Hosnon]

31. Case law has pretty much cleared up any of that though. nt

[MrCoffee]

32. If the 4th Amendment is finished, i'm turning in my bar card.

[Hosnon]

34. Finished? Not sure what you mean. But there is, as you know, oodles of

case law defining things such as "search."

[rug]

37. There are even more judges who wouldn't suppress a fire

even if their pants are burning.

[Hosnon]

33. Could not agree more. A common practice in international law is to craft

documents so that they are very loose. This encourages acceptance.

[bridgit]

35. i don't find it vague in the least; i find "outrages upon personal...

"...dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment" to be crystal clear amongst people versed in "personal dignity" and/or the english language :shrug:

[halobeam]

39. good point.

[MrCoffee]

40. That language is very vague...and it's a good thing it is.

Otherwise there wouldn't be a Common Article III to begin with (not to mention any of the Geneva Convention Articles).

The broader point isn't that it's vague, it's how the US Congress intends to interpret it now that SCOTUS has definitively held that Article III applies to the US treatment of detainees in the war on terror. * is arguing for a less restrictive reading, Congressional repubs and Colin Powell are saying no.

[bridgit]

41. imo no more vague than 'we hold these truths to be self evident'...

bush will forever argue for his own personal notion of freedom & liberty to do whatever the hell he wants...but that is not an option imfo

[DrBloodmoney]

42. It was adopted in 1929

why the fuck do we need to interpret it now.

[MoonRiver]

43. We don't! Because some things, such as torture, degradation and

inhumane treatment NEVER CHANGE! :think:

[annabanana]

44. Remember the breadth of the human imagination...

A book thicker that the national register could be written, specifying things that "constitute torture" and our infinite imagination would be able to make up a thousand thicker books of additional torture....

If it could conceivably be considered torture... IT'S TORTURE!

[Lisa]

46. Bush has defended abuse since 1967! Actual quote!

Remember this one? (It was in relation to a NY Times article on the injuries inflicted on pledges in his fraternity.)

"Bush was quoted in the New York Times defending the branding of fraternity pledges with a hot coat hanger, saying the resulting wounds resembled "only a cigarette burn.""

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/campaigns/wh2000/stories/bush072799.htm


I have read other accounts which stated that they would heat up a coat hanger (the tip had been filed down into a triangle shape, the symbol of the organization) and brand the terrified youngster with it on the rear or back -- an additional "refinement" was that at the same time, they would dunk a livestock-sized branding iron, which they had shown the freshman earlier, into a bucket of water to make a sizzling noise. The person would assume that he (Yale did not admit women at this time) had been branded with that very iron, and if the onlookers were "lucky" he would pass out from shock.

The Bush quote does raise a question from me -- how often do people burn themselves with cigarettes by accident, badly enough to leave a mark (let alone on the rear or back)? How would Bush know what such a thing looked like? Did he ever burn someone with a cigarette end, on purpose? For "fun"? I can't imagine any positive reason why such a burn would be inflicted -- and I discount the folk cure for leeches and ticks, because a) the cigarette or match isn't supposed to touch your skin, and b) the medical experts advise against it because the pain could make the creature release more infectious material into the wound.

[nadinbrzezinski]

49. As somebody whose job was to enforce this crap

it is NOT vague...it is broad, bush is looking for loopholes, but he looks for loopholes in anything he does. He'd love to destroy the Constitution too, because it is vague, to quote him