THERE IS NO CONFIDENCE IN THE MARKET SINCE OBAMA TOOK OFFICE. There is no way to get around that fact. The market has tanked and his lack of a plan to help is causing fear in the population.

When “they” have confidence in if their money is going down a rabbit hole or not, then the market will turn around. Geithner needs to go. Obama needs to get a clue. Congress needs to stay out of the banking business.

It quite honestly is no skin off our nose if we let the rest of the world slaughter each other, just as long as they leave us alone! Quite honestly, if we started treating our “captives” like our men are treated when they are captured all we would have to do is start cutting off their heads in front of a video camera and sending it out to every major news organization.

The U.S. is not the rest of the world’s police – let them do whatever the hell they want! It would be much more benficial for us to have the rest of the world’s RESPECT and not worry about having their “FRIENDSHIP” – which most of them conveniently forget about when it suits their own purpose anyway. Let them call us a “bully” – sticks and stones – they are going to do it anyway so they might as well have a legitimate reason for it! Some inflated sense of moral highground is just making us look like the rest of the world’s freaking doormat!

By the way, if the US withdraws from the Geneva Convention, we no longer get to piously condemn the human rights records of any other country ever again.

“Perhaps you haven’t been following along with the almost total collapse of the stock market SINCE Obama took office?”

I saw today in Fox News somebody being interviewed on the NY Stock Exchange floor saying that the administration was doing the right thing. What am I supposed to believe?

Besides what Obama says doesn’t drive the stock market. The market drives the market. They create their own ups and downs. Everything else is just fog and excuses.

OK – here is the response to your new direction. They are NOT POWs as defined by the Geneva Conventions. That is simply not what they are. I could define what that means – but there are several posts here that already do that. The Geneva Convention no more addresses the guys in Gitmo than it addresses lemonade stand construction.

It would be lots easier to take you seriously if you didn’t throw around terms you don’t understand to try to make points you haven’t thought through.

No one really KNOWS if torture was conducted at Gitmo- there are allegations aplenty- from former prisoners, and from former Army guards, and from the Red Cross:

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/04/28/60minutes/main691602.shtml

http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1710491,00.html

So even though it has not been proven in a court of law, I think there is plenty of reason to suspect that the US military did in fact torture prisoners at Gitmo.

However, you clearly separate Gitmo from the overseas prisons- we know even less about them, because they are…secret. Their existance is acknowledged, as reported by the NY Times, and not-plausibly denied by the Bush Admin.
What happened over there? No one knows, but the mere fact that the Government set up secret prisons, deliberately shielded from the view of the people, is , lets say, deeply suspect.
Here is an article from the Washington Post-
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/27/AR2007022702214.html

So all in all, there is a lot we don’t know about what our government has done to the people it imprisons.
And it is true, I am not an international rights attorney, and can’t parse the law the way some can.
What IS very clear, is that there is plenty of reason to think that our government had a systematic program, authorized at the very top, of imprisoning people who may or MAY NOT have been armed soldiers from the battlefield, and treating them in a way that, if not the legalistic definition of “torture” was inhumane and shameful.

As for your dismissal of “waterboarding”…Here, you are in direct opposition to our own US Army. The United States Army JAG clearly defined it as a war crime:
again a link-
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/02/AR2007110201170.html

What makes this so important is that when we make these things legitimate, it makes it also legitimate to treat our own soldiers the same way. Authorizing torture actually endangers every US service man and woman.

Have you ever read the GC? I think not, because the GC is very precise as to what a POW is. The terrorists DO NOT fit the POW category. Not even close.
When the GC’s were written, the category of ‘irregular’, guerrilla or terrorist was intentionally excluded. Including them now, expost-facto, would make the GC null and void.
I’m good with that. I’m surprised you are.
The GC the USA signed was done in ’49. It is GC #IV, IIRC. There was another GC, done in the late 70′s ( 77, I think) that the USA is NOT a party to. GC V covers terrorists and guerrillas, irregulars, etc. That is why the USA didn’t join it.
To call the terrs POW’s would be a sneaky, underhanded, backdoor way of getting around the Senate’s right to vote on treaties. That is something a leftoid would do, NOT a conservative administration.

The best thing we could have done was to hold them for ransom. The Nuslims would have understood this and it would not have been a problem. Set the ransoms for the real dangerous one at several trillion dollars, so that we could keep them as long as we liked. This violates GCIV, so we would need to withdraw from that treaty.
Every President should withdraw from a certain number of treaties, just to keep State awake and aware that their job is advancing the interests of the USA, NOT creating treaties. State loses sight of that fairly often.

http://www.unhchr.ch/html/menu3/b/91.htm

“A. Prisoners of war, in the sense of the present Convention, are persons belonging to one of the following categories, who have fallen into the power of the enemy:

1. Members of the armed forces of a Party to the conflict as well as members of militias or volunteer corps forming part of such armed forces.

2. Members of other militias and members of other volunteer corps, including those of organized resistance movements, belonging to a Party to the conflict and operating in or outside their own territory, even if this territory is occupied, provided that such militias or volunteer corps, including such organized resistance movements, fulfil the following conditions:

(a) That of being commanded by a person responsible for his subordinates;

(b) That of having a fixed distinctive sign recognizable at a distance;

(c) That of carrying arms openly;

(d) That of conducting their operations in accordance with the laws and customs of war.

3. Members of regular armed forces who profess allegiance to a government or an authority not recognized by the Detaining Power.

4. Persons who accompany the armed forces without actually being members thereof, such as civilian members of military aircraft crews, war correspondents, supply contractors, members of labour units or of services responsible for the welfare of the armed forces, provided that they have received authorization from the armed forces which they accompany, who shall provide them for that purpose with an identity card similar to the annexed model.

5. Members of crews, including masters, pilots and apprentices, of the merchant marine and the crews of civil aircraft of the Parties to the conflict, who do not benefit by more favourable treatment under any other provisions of international law.

6. Inhabitants of a non-occupied territory, who on the approach of the enemy spontaneously take up arms to resist the invading forces, without having had time to form themselves into regular armed units, provided they carry arms openly and respect the laws and customs of war. ”

Check out #6. To get POW status, the terrs have to meet that criteria. They don’t, so they CANNOT get POW status.
Period. They are not “lawful combatants”, which is why the Administration labeled them in the manner it did.

Like I wrote, the USA REALLY, REALLY needs to withdraw from the GC IV. Give notice and let State negotiate a new one that defines and covers terrorism while we are wait for the expiration period to elapse on GC IV.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123690358175013837.html
http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/1563748/obamas_poll_numbers_dropping.html
http://newsfeedresearcher.com/data/articles_n12/obama-president-approval.html