[ExI] barack W. obama

Stefano Vaj stefano.vaj at gmail.com
Tue Sep 29 13:14:46 UTC 2009


2009/9/29 spike <spike66 at att.net>:
> What is so new is the transparency provided by the internet.  We now have
> eyes and ears that were never available to the masses before the mid 90s.
> We have an additional ~20 IQ points in the form of massive quantitites of
> externalized knowledge right at our fingertips, in a searchable controllable
> format.  Thirty years ago no one would worry about a couple hundred
> ill-defined non-state acting hostiles being held prisoner somewhere far
> away.  Hell we wouldn't even know about it, much less would we be going nuts
> pondering it daily.
> The web changes everything.  Now we focus laser beam attention on the fact
> that our own government violates the constitution, regardless of what it
> does.

Yes, I agree. Even though I would not underestimate the TV etc etc.
And this is why and how we are discussing the subject.

Which only makes it more remarkably paradoxical that your government,
or for that matter the British Empire, may have been paradoxically
doing it *less* when it was more likely to get away with it. :-)

As Mirco says, governments have always had very traditional and
time-honoured legal ways to deal with their enemies.

The problem arises when today they do not want to recognise their
enemies as combatants rather than "criminals", or to take the
political responsibility of engaging *officially* in war operations,
"military assistance to allies", "far-reaching law enforcement" and
"international police operations" being more palatable for
contemporary political correctness.

Absurdly enough, this makes for the inapplicability of whatever war
law may still exist - which does forbid for instance torture on war
prisoners, whatever a given country may choose to do with its criminal
defendants -, *and* for devastating consequences on the criminal and
costitutional legal system of the country concerned.

-- 
Stefano Vaj



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