Please help me; open letter to Congress; convention on terror suspects

[originalpckelly]

An Open Letter To The United States Congress:

The United States should hold a convention to determine the rights and treatment of terrorism suspects. This way we could have specific procedures that could help our nation in the War on al-Qaeda and Terrorism in general. I would suggest the following to be the bar minimums of the convention:

1. The convention must have delegates from most of the countries participating in the U.N.

2. To add rights to prisoners a simple majority of the convention should be required.

3. To remove rights from prisoners a consensus of the convention should be required. This would protect the United States from countries that sponsor terrorism and torture.

4. War crimes for violating the traditional Geneva Conventions; if terrorists capture and hold American soldiers and do not treat them like POWs, the terrorists would be subject to violating the Geneva Conventions. This would allow for a less shaky prosecution of terrorists.

5. Terrorism extradition treaty; all parties to the convention should be able to pass suspects of terror quickly between so as to prevent terrorism from occurring, and easing the red tape involved in obtaining terrorists.

6. There should be a distinction between a terrorist arrested in nations, which do not at the state level sponsor terror, and nations that do sponsor terror. This way if more military actions (like the war in Afghanistan) need to be prosecuted terrorists will not be allowed to enter civilian courts. However, if the suspects are apprehended in nations that do not sponsor terror they should be treated to standard courts. This will prevent citizens of civil countries from being taken and held indefinitely, unless apprehended on a battlefield that implies a non-penitential detention like normal wars. The definition of a battlefield should not be extended to be within civil national borders, such as the USA's.

This would give our courts better guidance when dealing with terrorism suspects. It appears that to some degree suspects are in limbo when it comes to adhering to international law.

Hopefully, this would also protect our soldiers if they were to be held by the enemy. If they were mistreated and not given rights under the traditional Geneva Conventions, when found and released we the USA could charge the terrorists with specific war crimes.

The convention should also have provisions on how to try someone for their terrorist activities, that is in addition to their crimes if they hold American soldiers, but also if they are involved in terrorist activities. This would be a lot better than the way we are now charging terrorists, via the method of conspiracy, which is not a true war-crime but a method of war-crime.

It is the goal of this convention to facilitate the struggle between civil nations and terrorism. It also seeks to protect our soldiers. I don't quite frankly know how someone could be against doing that. I hope that all who receive this letter support and call for this international convention on terrorism.

P.C. Kelly
Private citizen and advocate of our great nation

[originalpckelly]

1. bump

[Why Syzygy]

2. While I appreciate your thoughtfulness

on this matter, it seems very unrealistic to expect "terrorists" to abide by the Geneva Convention.
What you suggest has already been done to an extent. That's how we got the Geneva.
What we need to is force Bush and his fellow criminals to follow it. The radical muslims believe beheading is a perfectly fine activity. There is NO WAY they are going to accord any of our military any kind of rights whatsoever. I don't think any military have been captured since the Jessica episode. But we know what happened to the mercenaries who were burned in public and strung up.