[quote]orion wrote:
Remember that Germany is a country where the government actually needs a warrant to listen to your phone calls, [/quote]
Also true in America. The exceptions – which are being challenged in court by the way – are for very specific cases. This involves phone calls originating outside the USA, going to terror suspects inside the USA. So technically, the NSA could not legally monitor any phone calls that I or roughly 300 million Americans make.
I know you’d like this to be a cut and dry issue but there is significant legal argument to be made that this falls within the right of the executive branch to intercept enemy communications during a time of war.
If they monitor non-citizen’s communications all the time, I don’t care.
Personally, I don’t support the system as it is. I think eventually, when the legal battle is over with, the FISA court will have been revised to be more responsive to the nature of the threat, returning judicial oversight of the situation.
As usual, your reading of the situation is shallow and incorrect.
This is absolutely untrue. If this has been tried domestically on a US citizen, they would have an easy time in court, as protection from unlawful search and seizure is a bedrock of the Constitution (4th amendment). There are certain exceptions to this protection that are pretty well defined by US law.
If the government has done this to non-citizens living in the US, I could care less.
This is true of the system in the US, you fucking nitwit. Section 215 of the Patriot Act requires a warrant from a judge for any of this.
Yet you don’t see a problem with all the banned books your country has? All of the “prohibited thoughts” and “hate speech” that your government deems you too stupid to handle?
If the US monitors every single communication and transaction involving non-citizens in the USA – so what?
Also not legal in the US without a warrant. If the government does this to non-US citizens: big deal.
4th Amendment. If the government does this to non-citizens I don’t give a shit.
I don’t care about “kidnapping” foreigners plotting attacks against the USA if the country they are in refuses to act. If they kidnap American citizens without due process this is illegal.
Neither does the US as a matter of policy. The offenders from Abu Ghraib are in prison.
I don’t consider sleep interruption, or harsh language “torture”.
I consider your grandparents making lamps out of Jews’ skins, wrapping people in barbed wire, making Jews quarry rocks with their fingernails, and injecting gas into their eyeballs just to see what happened “torture”.
Non-uniformed enemy combatants, according to the Geneva conventions, have no rights that we don’t choose to give them. They are not “civilians” if captured on the battlefield without a uniform, which you would know if you’d ever bothered to read the Conventions. They are considered “beyond the pale”, “barbarians”, “those not adhering to even the most basic rules of war”.
I personally disagree with the policy of the US of capturing and interrogating these people in some far away base. If the person in question was operating outside of the Geneva Convention, by using civilians for cover, or for masquerading as civilians during combat, the procedure ought to be fairly simple.
I believe the interrogation ought to happen in Iraq or Afghanistan, and then they ought to be executed. This was the practice during the Second World War under similar circumstances with all of the Allied powers.
If they were fighting within the bounds of the Convention, I believe we ought to either turn them back over to the country they were captured in. Or if we are going to treat them as POWs, we ought to put them in a POW camp until the war ends. That means if it happens 25 years from now, too bad.
There you go. How are you feeling about jailing a historian for disagreeing with official accounts of the Holocaust, or having a censor go through your video games and books to thought police out all the “questionable material”?
Oh, and go fuck yourself for the flag-waving comments. Just because your country isn’t worth being proud of, doesn’t mean mine isn’t.