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Originally posted by Thomas Crowne
I feel your pain.
Tell me, the female that is going to be busted to Heck and back; she was not even assigned to the prison but only came around to visit. What kind of freakin' leadership allows visitors in the prison?
Originally posted by CommonSense
DC,
Don't get me wrong, I not calling for the death penalty. I only have two points.
1) Given the nature of the crime and being at war, does this fall to our jurisdiction or that of the international courts?
It would only fall under the jurisdiction of the UCMJ, because one of the first things GW did was pull us out of the international court system, which I believe was a good thing, because I think it's important that we police our own. Another thing he did, incidentally, was pull out of the ABM treaty so he could start testing his new nukes, which is bad, very baaad.
2) Given the opinions of the rest of the world, let's assume we try them and sentence them to 15 years, compared to a sentence of 5 years if tried internationally. Notwithstanding potentially dealing out a more severe punishment ourselves, I tthink the world is just screwed up enough to say we would have gone easy on them.
I won't be surprised when no one does more than 5 for this anyway. People don't generally understand this, but really, the bad conduct discharge is a pretty bad punishment, too. That carries a lot of consequences, but the civilian populous probably won't soon understand, and niether will Iraqis, so it won't seem to anyone that there has been any punishment conferred. It will actually seem that there was no one punished, but if Rummy goes down, that would be a much better show of faith. I believe the extremists intend to punish us in their own way anyway.
I also think it's important to remember that these weren't innocent chior boys in the prison.
That is very true, but from the point of view of the extremists, they are as good as living martyrs. To them, these people could not have possibly done any wrong, and they probably think now that they were placed in the prison by Allah, so that they could be 'touched' by the Great Satan, and thus bring more fighters to the cause. I don't know what they think, but if I were a crazy, overzealous religious extremist, that's certainly how I'd try to play it up. It's all about the propaganda now...
Originally posted by DeltaChaos
It would only fall under the jurisdiction of the UCMJ, because one of the first things GW did was pull us out of the international court system, which I believe was a good thing, because I think it's important that we police our own. Another thing he did, incidentally, was pull out of the ABM treaty so he could start testing his new nukes, which is bad, very baaad.
Our exemption from the int'l courts? I don't see how they could. Any foreign lawyer wouldn't have jurisdiction to undermine American soveriegnty, and any American lawyer would probably be squashed by the Attourney General like a bug. Especially the current one, you know what I mean?
Originally posted by CommonSense
I know a lot of lawyers that would just love to yank the exemption out from under us.
All the more reason for the leadership of the units involved to go down hard. This is purely a command issue for allowing lax standards and lack of proper supervision. Remember, they are accountable for all that their unit does and does not do, so they are ultimately accountable, and should acknowledge this themselves.
Originally posted by Thomas Crowne
... the female that is going to be busted to Heck and back; she was not even assigned to the prison but only came around to visit. What kind of freakin' leadership allows visitors in the prison?