Comments on: May Day, or “You may fire when ready, Gridley.”

By: GB

GB — Tue, 05 May 2009 17:20:07 +0000

emeraldcitysavant:

A constitution is a document that creates a state/polity consisting of a citizenry/body politic and the institutions through which they govern and are governed. Ideally, it also identifies their pre-existing rights in an enforceable way and limits what their government can do to them.

By definition, a constitution can only uphold the rights of the citizens of that body politic and others lawfully resident on their soil against their own government. It can’t be used to uphold those people’s rights against foreign states, which are none other than those agreed by treaty. Nor can it be used to defend the rights of foreign nationals not lawfully on the country’s soil and thus subject to the constitution.

All of which is true whether or not the US Supreme Court agrees. The Court lacks the power or authority to declare that up is down or black is white.

Therefore the US Constitution applies only to terrorists arrested on US soil, or arrested abroad and being US citizens.

International law comprises treaties freely agreed by sovereign nations and customary practices. Contrary to transnationalist thinking, international lawyers’ seminars and even courts also cannot alter reality. That being so, treaties are binding only on members and customary international law is limited only to well-established and universally accepted norms. Surprisingly little of what transnational advocates say has been the norms since 1945 actually meets that test.

Therefore the US is bound only by that part of Geneva to which it is party, unlike those countries who signed the 1977 Additional protocol agreeing to treat terrorists as though they are soldiers. And the US is bound only to the firmly established older norm that they are not.

Following this line, neither the Constitution nor international law is any problem. The US Constitution is not applicable unless US soil and/or US citizens are involved. If the US government sent its own citizens to Gitmo in lieu of trial, I agree that would be a problem. International law is not a problem because terrorists are not soldiers any more than they are domestic criminals, and the US has signed no treaty agreeing to falsely pretend that they are.

None of which is rocket science, nor amenable to change by courts. As I said, courts do not have the power to reorder reality.

I used to shock peers by analogizing terrorists to pirates, a third category neither deserving nor getting the rights of criminal defendants or POWs. The obvious conclusion is more than some folks will stomach. I suppose I can’t use that analogy now that pirates are back and we no longer know how to deal with them, either.

By: wdriver

wdriver — Mon, 04 May 2009 18:36:31 +0000

Emeraldcitysavant,

No, we do not ever tire from resorting to the same agrument(s) because we have to deal with those, like yourself, who constantly raise the same tired ‘holier than thou’ detritus.

By: Haggy Williams

Haggy Williams — Sun, 03 May 2009 21:51:42 +0000

If we had a President with any balls he would send the Spanish Government a little note indicating that we would be taking them to court for crimes against humanity in their conquest of Mexico and South America. Of course we would be willing to drop the case if they would shut up and go away. OLE…

By: Emeraldcitysavant

Emeraldcitysavant — Sun, 03 May 2009 07:29:45 +0000

I am particularly struck by the line, “…when Garzon attempted to extradite the aging Augosto Pinochet from Britain on charges (of) genocide.” What importance is it, exactly, that Pinochet was ‘aging’ (like everyone else for that matter)? Those of us who do not reside on ‘planet neocon’ and live instead in the real world (where global warming is a fact and not ‘politically correct’ science and were not persuaded by some laughably dismissable prediction that McCain would crush Obama or, my favorite, that ‘aging’ academes are so corrosive to young minds as to be ‘tenured radicals’) recognize Pinochet for who he was: a brutal and oppressive dictator who exercised torture and human rights violations (perhaps it should be the task of the conservative to show how human rights are a ‘social construction’) on the people of Chile for nearly 17 years. It is rather remarkable how almost anything the left does can be explained and dismissed as an act of p.c.ness. I suppose conservatives think the same of reading detainees (err, um, terrorists) their rights (like both the U.D.H.R. and the U.S. Constitution require); seriously, do conservatives ever tire from resorting to the same argument?

By: M. Simon

M. Simon — Sat, 02 May 2009 21:02:32 +0000

I wouldn’t call Teddy “The Good Roosevelt”. He went all progressive in the end.

I think “The Better Roosevelt” is closer to the mark.

By: Gualdo Hidalgo

Gualdo Hidalgo — Sat, 02 May 2009 20:11:54 +0000

Judge Baltasar Garzon, a Socialist militant- has exhibited a notorious tendency to please leftists’ agenda by his issuance of arrest warrant for Augusto Pinochet, his desire to prosecute Henry Kissinger, and his reluctant to charge Fidel Castro during the Cuban dictator trip to Spain.
Now he is committed to charge six former Bush officials: Alberto Gonzales, former Attorney General; John Yoo, of the Office of Legal Counsel; Douglas Feith, former undersecretary of defense for policy; William Haynes II, former general counsel for the Department of Defense; Jay Bybee, also at Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel; and David Addington, Vice President Dick Cheney’s Chief of Staff.
In response to a journalist from Dominican Republic, as to whether he would chargeFidel Castro, Judge Garzon answered: “Proceedings cannot be taken against serving heads of state for any kind of crime, and the standards of the 1969 treaties and the immunity of heads of state are valid. Only an international court has the right to do so.” He admitted having received accusations against Fidel Castro but he “had not studied them in depth, given that action was not viable on account of the limits imposed by international principles”. On April 28, 2001, Castro stated on the daily communist newspaper Granma:” I do not have, nor did I have, the least concern about Mr. Garzon. Quite simply, I am not under his jurisdiction, nor that of Spanish law”.
Garzon was expelled from Catholic monasteries where he was pursuing priesthood for serenading a girl at another school.
In 1993, Socialist Prime Minister Felipe Gonzalez persuaded him to run for the ruling party PSOE (Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party). Garzon came second in votes, behind Gonzalez. Garzon was put in charge of anti-drug projects, but he quickly walked out, saying he was not being given the tools to do the job. Party sources said he was upset about being passed over for higher posts, in specific having not being appointed as Minister of Justice. He then angered Gonzalez followers by pressing criminal charges against government officials. “Garzon has an obsessive ambition to head the International Court of the Hague, no matter what” says a Spanish attorney who knows him both professionally and personally.
Judge Garzon has been questioned for tax irregularities. He took a sabbatical year in 2005-2006 to lecture on international terrorism in United States, making $ 100.000 dollars for each of 17 lectures known as “Transatlantic Dialogue” (1.7 million dollars), most from sponsor Banco de Santander, plus his regular salary. On November 27, 2006, after his paid trip to New York, Garzon dropped charges against Bank Santander directors who were accused of stealing 700 million pesetas, which according to the plaintiff were not in the bank books. One of the main shareholders of Banco de Santander is JP Morgan. Emilio Botin, the director of Bank Santander, is known as “the man of New York in Spain”. Garzon is widely considered an “untouchable”. The Judicial Power General Council of Spain confirmed that Garzon didn’t inform about his double remuneration while in sabbatical leave, in violation of Spain laws.
In February 2003, Garzón also ordered the closure of Egunkaria, the only newspaper wholly written in Basque language, once again alleging links with ETA. The evidence was never presented. There was an outcry of public opinion against the newspaper. Prominent intellectual figures like Salman Rushdie and Noam Chomsky condemned the closure.
The Spanish judge’s quixotic quest for justice is deeply conflicting. The Spanish government pardoned officials involved in crimes during the rule of fascist General Francisco Franco. Fidel Castro was a close friend of Franco. Garzón dropped the case against Franco and his allies. Previously, Garzón had formally declared the acts of repression committed by the Franco regime to be crimes against humanity, and accounted them in more than one hundred thousand killings during and after the Spanish Civil War, among them, the poet Federico García Lorca.
Garzon’s investigations crossed paths with another Spanish judge; Manuel Garcia-Castellon was examining the whereabouts of 100 Spaniards who “disappeared” under Pinochet’s regime. Garcia-Castellon focused on the cross-border assassination schemes known as Operation Condor. In1998, Garcia-Castellon traveled to United States to ask the FBI for its files on Operation Condor. The judge cited a 1990 legal assistance treaty that calls for the exchange of information between U.S. and Spanish law enforcement. He returned to Spain with information that was already known. Most of the U.S. evidence came from the Orlando Letelier’s case, the former Chilean diplomat who was murdered by a car-bomb in Washington in 1976. The CIA had worked closely with DINA in the 1970s, but the CIA never divulged anything about Operation Condor. Garcia-Castellon interviewed Michael Townley, the DINA agent who carried out the Letelier assassination- currently in the federal witness protection program. The judge also interviewed former DINA chief Manuel Contreras, who was convicted in Chile for masterminding the Letelier assassination plot. Contreras reaffirmed that his superiors in the Chilean government approved all his actions. Chilean government documents have established that Pinochet kept tight personal control over DINA.
Margaret Thatcher praised Pinochet as “a friend of England during the Falklands War” in 1982. Columnist Charles Krauthammer wrote that Pinochet’s arrest was “a blow for the most ideologically selective justice and for the rankest hypocrisy” — an attempt by “the European left … to give itself a little consolation prize.” William F. Buckley denounced the charges as “an act of ideological malice” against a restrained military leader who ousted president Salvador Allende, who was defiling the Chilean constitution and waving proudly the banner of his friend and idol, Fidel Castro.”
Pinochet received another blow when the Clinton administration announced that it would declassify more secret documents that might be relevant to Garzon’s case. U.S. officials said the cause of human rights outweighed the risk to U.S. national security. Commenting on that decision, one former CIA official complained to The New York Times that the decision could open “a can of worms.”
CIA veterans believed that the evidence could implicate senior officials of the U.S. government, including former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger who oversaw the Chile policy for President Nixon in the early 1970s. Even President George Bush Sr. – who was CIA director in 1976 when DINA agents carried out the Letelier bombing in Washington-, could be questioned. It was unclear if the CIA missed the warning signs on Letelier plot or if the agency chose to look the other way while an allied government got rid of a troublesome dissident.
While Pinochet had been arrested at a private London clinic by an order from a left-wing Spanish judge seeking to jail him under international human-rights treaties, the Cuban dictator Castro was pontificating before journalists at a castle in Spain where he was an honored guest at an international conference of Latin American presidents.
“We do not consider that Fidel Castro is a dictator,” declares Willy Meyer, a leading parliamentary for Izquierda Unida (United Left), Spain’s renamed Communist Party which led the campaign to extradite Pinochet. While enjoying the fruits of Spain’s peaceful transition from the Francisco Franco dictatorship to a democratic system, the Spanish left ignores the cries of Cuba’s tormented democratic opposition. “We respect the Marxist-Leninist legality by whose definition political persecution, torture and disappearances cannot exist in Cuba,” says Meyer.
The communists documented thousands of cases of human-rights violations suffered by leftists, including 90 Spanish nationals who had gone to Chile in 1973. Most of these were violent fighters who travelled to Chile to support the paramilitary activities of the Marxist government of Salvador Allende and seized the opportunity to install a socialist regime. Chile, once South America’s most prosperous economy, was on the verge of a communist takeover. The economy was destroyed by 1,000 percent inflation, nationalization of private industry and the terrorism of Cuban-trained revolutionary militias invading factories and farms.
Allende was condemned by democratically elected Chilean parliament for abrogating the constitution, illegally collecting secret arms and moving the international brigades into positions encircling Chile’s capital. At that time thousands of women took to the streets in protest, banging pots and pans in opposition to Allende and his Communist policies. Chilean women took the lead because the communists were brutally persecuting those men who dared to oppose Allende and the reds.
The Chilean army, navy and air force moved to stop the Communists and restore constitutional order. Pinochet had been appointed by Allende himself and had refused to act against him until, in a general disintegrating social order, huge crowds of Chilean women began shaming the military and calling them cowards. At that moment, the encirclement of the capital by the international brigades became incontrovertible. These are the people whose “human rights” are alleged to have been violated when military forces declared martial law, rounded up the foreign-led guerrilla forces and executed many of them. Allende himself committed suicide with an assault rifle given to him by Castro.
In fact, according to Cuban secret agents currently exiled, Salvador Allende did not commit suicide, nor died under the bullets of the military coup participants the 11th, September, 1973. During the assault against La Moneda palace, the president of Chile was cowardly assassinated by Cuban police General Patricio de la Guardia, who was in charge of Allende’s protection. While the military was bombing the place, Allende, frightened by terror, ran by the corridors of the second floor of the palace shouting: “It is necessary to surrender”. Before he could do it, Patricio de la Guardia waited Allende returned to his writing-desk and shot him in the head with a machine-gun burst. Immediately, he put on the body of Allende a gun – making believe that he was murdered by the military attackers and returned in a rush to first floor of the flaming building where they waited for other Cubans to leave. The group left La Moneda palace in complete silence and after minutes took refuge in Cuba´s embassy, located near from the palace (According to testimonies of high ranking Cuban intelligence officers Juan Vives (Osvaldo Dorticós Torrado´s nephew , the operetta’s Cuban president that reigned from 1959 to 1976, and “was forced to suicide” in dark circumstances in 1983) and Daniel Alarcón Ramirez (a.k.a “Benigno” , one of the three survivors from the guerrilla of Ernesto “Che” Guevara in Bolivia).
Gualdo Hidalgo, former Cuban political prisoner(hun.ter99@yahoo.com)

By: Roger Godby

Roger Godby — Sat, 02 May 2009 14:58:33 +0000

Spain still has the Canaries. There are also two cities in Morocco, but they’ll eventually be overrun or returned as an apology to Morocco for having offended the country with the Spanish presence for so long.

By: flying squirrel

flying squirrel — Sat, 02 May 2009 13:37:42 +0000

“The pains in Spain fail insanely in the brain.”
“The brains in Spain flail inanely, it is plain.”

By: Roger Kimball

Roger Kimball — Sat, 02 May 2009 10:49:45 +0000

Thanks to FRML, #24: the extra “el” is history. Thanks for the correction.

By: frml

frml — Sat, 02 May 2009 10:06:09 +0000

Roger, it’s spelled Manila. One el. I read somewhere that its supposed to be Manilla envelope, but really it’s almost always spelled with only one el, as well. I just came from Manila Bay a few minutes ago. Very calm, and calming. Regards, and keep up the good work.
F.