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::crickets::
United Nations investigates Obama's drone attacks to see if killing civilians is a war crime
Official who monitors counter-terrorism for the UN says US drone strikes in Pakistan – where those helping victims of earlier attacks or attending funerals were killed – may amount to war crimes.
THE UNITED NATIONS is to set up a dedicated investigations unit in Geneva to examine the legality of drone attacks in cases where civilians are killed in so-called 'targeted' counter-terrorism operations. The announcement was made by Ben Emmerson QC, a UN special rapporteur, in a speech to Harvard law school in which he condemned secret rendition and waterboarding as crimes under international law.
His forthright comments, directed at both US presidential candidates, will be seen as an explicit challenge to the prevailing US ideology of the global war on terror.
Earlier this summer, Emmerson, who monitors counter-terrorism for the UN, called for effective investigations into drone attacks. Some US drone strikes in Pakistan – where those helping victims of earlier attacks or attending funerals were killed – may amount to war crimes, Emmerson warned.
In his Harvard speech, he revealed: "If the relevant states are not willing to establish effective independent monitoring mechanisms … then it may in the last resort be necessary for the UN to act. Together with my colleague Christof Heyns, [the UN special rapporteur on extra-judicial killings], I will be launching an investigation unit within the special procedures of the [UN] Human Rights Council to inquire into individual drone attacks."
The unit will also look at "other forms of targeted killing conducted in counter-terrorism operations, in which it is alleged that civilian casualties have been inflicted, and to seek explanations from the states using this technology and the states on whose territory it is used. [It] will begin its work early next year and will be based in Geneva."
Security officials who took part in waterboarding interrogations or secret rendition removals should be made accountable for their actions and justice, Emmerson added. "The time has come," he said, "for the international community to agree minimum standard principles for investigating such allegations and holding those responsible to account.
"Let us be clear on this: secret detention is unlawful as a matter of international law. Waterboarding is always torture. Torture is an international crime of universal jurisdiction. The torturer, like the pirate before him, is regarded in international law as the enemy of all mankind. There is therefore a duty on states to investigate and to prosecute acts of torture."
The US stance of conducting counter-terrorism operations against al-Qaida or other groups anywhere in the world because it is deemed to be an international conflict was indefensible, he maintained.
"The global war paradigm has done immense damage to a previously shared international consensus on the legal framework underlying both international human rights law and international humanitarian law," Emmerson said. "It has also given a spurious justification to a range of serious human rights and humanitarian law violations.
"The [global] war paradigm was always based on the flimsiest of reasoning, and was not supported even by close allies of the US. The first-term Obama administration initially retreated from this approach, but over the past 18 months it has begun to rear its head once again, in briefings by administration officials seeking to provide a legal justification for the drone programme of targeted killing in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia …
"[It is] alleged that since President Obama took office at least 50 civilians were killed in follow-up strikes when they had gone to help victims and more than 20 civilians have also been attacked in deliberate strikes on funerals and mourners. Christof Heyns … has described such attacks, if they prove to have happened, as war crimes. I would endorse that view."
Emmerson singled out both President Obama and the Republican challenger Mitt Romney for criticism. "It is perhaps surprising that the position of the two candidates on this issue has not even featured during their presidential elections campaigns, and got no mention at all in Monday night's foreign policy debate.
"We now know that the two candidates are in agreement on the use of drones. But the issue of so-called enhanced interrogation techniques is an one which, according to the record, continues to divide them.
"I should make it absolutely clear that my mandate does not see to eye to eye with the Obama administration on a range of issues – not least the lack of transparency over the drone programme. But on this issue the president has been clear since he took office that water-boarding is torture that it is contrary to American values and that it would stop.
"... But Governor Romney has said that he does not believe that waterboarding is torture. He has said that he would allow enhanced interrogation techniques that go beyond those now permitted by the army field manual, and his security advisers have recommended that he rescind the existing restrictions."
The Cambodian dictator Pol Pot, Emmerson pointed out, used the technique. "Anyone who is in doubt about whether waterboarding is torture should visit Tuol Sleng, the infamous S-21 detention facility operated by the Khymer Rouge in Phnom Penh.
"Over a period of four years 14,000 people were systematically tortured and killed there. It is now a genocide museum. And right there, in the middle of the central torturing room, is the apparatus used by Pol Pot's security officials for waterboarding."
http://stopwar.org.uk/index.php/usa-...are-war-crimes
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Of course they are war crimes.
::crickets::
My biggest beefs with Obama are on civil liberties. If Romney offered a competing view in those categories, he would get my vote, but he does not. I'm also not wasting my vote on a third party candidate that can not win When a third party becomes viable, I will definitely give them consideration, but I am not naive. Voting third party and giving the election to someone worse that Obama isn't teaching him a lesson, its hurting myself. I understand that there is never going to be a candidate that I completely agree with unless I run myself.
I have no problem with Obama's foreign policy, including the drone strikes. I didn't have a problem when Bush did it either. My biggest problem with Bush's foreign policy was that he was inept at running it. It sucks that innocent people get killed in drone strikes, but happens in war. Unlike the our enemies, we are not TARGETING civilians. If we wanted to kill civilians, the death toll would be a lot higher. I wish we could just mind our business and not be bothered, ala the Ron Paul philosophy, but I'm afraid its far to late for that. The sins of our fathers have tainted our image in the middle east for generations to come, and we will have to deal with the fallout.
So your solution to making up for our -ups in the Middle East and healing our image is just to drone people instead of sending in the troops? Illogical, tbh...
The only way we have a chance at healing our image abroad is to stop behaving like an empire and get our nose out of everyone else's business unless we are DIRECTLY threatened, tbh...
Unlike Obamney, Gary Johnson says he doesn't want to bomb Iran. Pretty sure Ron Paul wouldn't bomb Iran either.
It's okay because Obama is a Democrat and social liberal. When it comes to foreign policy, Obama is straight up neo-con.
lol Liberals all silent. What a turnaround from about 4 years ago when Bush was doing these things.
Actually, there have been many threads critical of Obama on this subject from his supporters.
You just never read anything but your own posts.
If you can point to a thread where these so called Liberals have supported Obama's renewal of the Patriot Act, Gitmo, or the NDAA, please do so. As far as I've seen most of the Obama supporters on this site are annoyed with those things and don't try to defend them.
Isn't it funny the outrage only exists during a republican's term?
Did you read my post? I'm liberal and I have plenty of outrage towards Obama's decision on The Patriot Act, the NDAA, Gitmo, Netanyahu, etc.
So outraged and annoyed that they still support him. Makes a lot of sense.
A vote for Obama is a vote for more war and the murder of innocent women and children. They were so vocal against Bush, about war crimes, etc, but no such talk like like that on Obama. You know that.
Simple criticism here and there is nothing compared to the everyday attack on sorry ass war crime Bush, even though Bush bombed 4 countries in 8 years, and Obama bombed 6 countries in less than 4. lol
Could you specifically point out posters who are "annoyed" by these things, and liberal in your opinion? Thanks in advance.
Sure, as an individual.
What about the mainscream media?
I think the reason why Bush got more because he was apathetic toward it. He didn't want every American to like and he didn't give a about it either. Obama cares way too much about how he is viewed by Americans. Obama wants people to like him. It's a weakness if you ask me. You are suppose to be a leader, not everyone's best friend.
lol it's just a different set of talking points
A vote for Obama is a vote for more war and the murder of innocent women and children. They were so vocal against Bush, about war crimes, etc, but no such talk like like that on Obama. You know that.
Simple criticism here and there is nothing compared to the everyday attack on sorry ass war crime Bush, even though Bush bombed 4 countries in 8 years, and Obama bombed 6 countries in less than 4. lol
Liberals let Obama get away with uncons utional actions
Let us stipulate, as lawyers like to say, that President Obama has a deplorable record on civil liberties, one that threatens long-term damage to the country’s cons utional culture.
Why, then, has his base of support not been eroded decisively? Why have so many on the left fallen silent, after railing against George W. Bush’s rights violations, as Obama has prolonged and codified most of the same practices? And why have so few on the right, riding a groundswell of resentment toward big government, failed to resent the biggest governmental intrusions into personal privacy since the FBI’s domestic spying during the Cold War?
The facts are not in dispute. While Obama has ordered an end to CIA kidnapping and torture, he has personally approved kill lists containing the names of American citizens to be targeted by drones. While he has tried to move the accused masterminds of 9/11 and others from Guantanamo to civilian courts (only to be blocked by congressional Republicans), he has also embraced military commissions and indefinite detention. He voiced misgivings about a bill subjecting suspected terrorists to military arrest — whether foreigners or Americans, whether in Afghanistan or Alabama — and then signed it into law.
In practically every significant court case, his administration has argued for an expansive encroachment on individual rights, much as the Bush administration did. Obama’s Justice Department has successfully opposed the habeas corpus pe ions of Guantanamo prisoners, persuading conservative judges to rule in one case that sketchy, unverified intelligence reports must be presumed correct. This absurdity has now entered case law as an erosion of the venerable right, dating from the Magna Carta, to summon your jailer before an impartial magistrate.
The administration has continued undermining the Fourth Amendment. It argued in the Supreme Court, unsuccessfully, that law enforcement should be free to attach GPS tracking devices to vehicles without showing probable cause and getting warrants. It has vigorously used a tool that Obama denounced in the 2008 campaign: the administrative subpoenas known as National Security Letters, which are issued without warrants to acquire the library, Internet, banking and other records of individuals suspected of nothing at all. His Justice Department has invoked state secrets, as did Bush’s, to deny wrongfully imprisoned and tortured victims the right to sue the government. The administration has sought broad immunity for Secret Service agents and others in law enforcement who arrest people exercising their First Amendment right to speech.
Obama’s solicitor general has just made a catch-22 argument before the Supreme Court that could exempt from cons utional challenge the law that authorizes the interception of Americans’ international communications without probable cause — the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, broadened in 2008 with Obama’s vote as senator. Because the surveillance by the National Security Agency is secret, his administration argues, there is no way for the lawyers, journalists and rights organizations who suspect they are being monitored to prove that they are, in fact, targets of surveillance, and therefore they have no standing to sue.
These acts aren’t deal-breakers for many voters, except among a small number of civil liberties advocates, such as Conor Friedersdorf of The Atlantic, whose blog “Why I Refuse to Vote for Barack Obama” deplored the left’s lack of outrage. Other liberals, seeing a constellation of social and economic issues, don’t want to damage Obama’s re-election chances by speaking out. He’ll probably get the votes of most lawyers for the ACLU, which has criticized him persistently. And his judicial nominees will be more liberal than Mitt Romney’s. So there is no opportunity for principled voting. Without a civil liberties candidate with a chance to win, pragmatic balloting is unavoidable.
A symmetrical silence about Obama’s rights policies afflicts Republicans. They worry that government is too big when it funds programs for the poor but not when it funds wars. It is too big when it regulates business but not when it regulates individual lives. It can decide whom people may marry, restrict women’s control over their pregnancies and evade the Fourth Amendment by invading Americans’ privacy. Only true libertarians seem to care.
But there is more here than hypocrisy. Terrorism remains a threat, as the FBI repeatedly reminds the country with sting operations that lure hapless wannabes into dramatic plots they couldn’t execute without undercover agents. Each arrest stokes the public’s fear. Furthermore, rights violations are largely clandestine and invisible. Their targets are “others,” meaning foreigners, terrorists, common criminals and various people not like “us.”
Ten years after the 9/11 attacks, polling by the AP and the National Opinion Research Center found that those surveyed supported, by 65 to 21 percent, a government policy to read, without warrants, any emails to people inside the U.S. from countries known for terrorism. By 48 to 37 percent, respondents favored warrantless monitoring of U.S. citizens’ Internet searches “to watch for su ious activities,” not further defined. In other words, I’m willing to give up your rights for my security.
It’s not generally understood that cons utional rights are not divisible, that those denied to others, including suspected terrorists, are also denied to “us.” For example, Ernesto Miranda of the Miranda warning, who secured our right to silence during police interrogation, was not a model citizen. He had a long record and had kidnapped and raped a mentally defective teenager. Yet his right now belongs to us all.
A certain appreciation of cons utional law is required to grasp what has happened under the Bush and Obama administrations, and neither the press nor the school system educates well on these issues. It has been widely noted that global warming went unmentioned in the presidential debates, but hardly anyone has observed that both poverty and civil liberties (and the Supreme Court) were also ignored by the candidates and moderators.
It took a comedian, Jon Stewart, to raise Bush-era surveillance policies with Obama, on The Daily Show on Oct. 18. “We have modified them,” the president said. “Now, they’re not real sexy issues.”
Stewart replied: “You don’t know what I find sexy.”
http://www.salon.com/2012/11/03/why_...vil_liberties/
Red team evades the very same questions, yet you keep saying the same thing over and over again . . .
*squawk*
Your comments would make sense if I supported Red team.
your slapping has been a bit one-sided in this thread.
This thread is about blue team hypocrisy. These are things blue team are supposed to be against. It's expected from Red team.
appreciate the confirmation
http://www.spurstalk.com/forums/show...5327&p=6189751
HAHHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.....
Kuchinich is about as "blue" as it gets.
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