Obama's First Week

Fred Garvin's picture

In his first week as POTUS, barry has achieved the following:

1. Ordered the closing of Guantanamo

2. Handcuffed military tribunals & interrogation efforts of enemy combatants.

3. Made his first official telephone call as President to the Palestinian leadership [as opposed to any of our allies].

4. Firmly supported a tax dodger to head up the IRS.

5. Dedicated American taxpayer funds to support abortion [infanticide] mills in foreign countries.

6. Lifted all bans on partial-birth murder of innocent babies in America.

7. Addressed Muslims at El Aribya before in his first television interview.

Just one week. I shudder at the thought of what the country will be like after 4 years of this nonsense.

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Well Fred
JeffC's picture
Submitted by JeffC on Tue, 01/27/2009 - 4:51pm.

Your complaint about the closing of Guantanamo is another mess that can be laid at the Bush administration.

The Fourth Geneva Convention, Article. 4. says: “Persons protected by the Convention are those who, at a given moment and in any manner whatsoever, find themselves, in case of a conflict or occupation, in the hands of a Party to the conflict or Occupying Power of which they are not nationals.”

This definition of “protected persons” specifically does not include POWs which have their own guaranteed protections enumerated elsewhere.

And they could have been held incommunicado:

Article. 5: “Where in occupied territory an individual protected person is detained as a spy or saboteur, or as a person under definite suspicion of activity hostile to the security of the Occupying Power, such person shall, in those cases where absolute military security so requires, be regarded as having forfeited rights of communication under the present Convention.”

Non-POWs under definite suspicion of activity hostile to the security of the Occupying Power... sounds just like the Guantanamo detainees doesn't it?

Art. 49. “Individual or mass forcible transfers, as well as deportations of protected persons from occupied territory to the territory of the Occupying Power or to that of any other country, occupied or not, are prohibited, regardless of their motive.”

If the Bush administration had not violated the Geneva Conventions the detainees would not have been at Guantanamo in the first place. They would still be in custody in Afghanistan and Iraq where they could have been held until the end of hostilities then either tried or not.


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