"Dave" wrote in message
...
On Tue, 25 Oct 2005 08:41:58 -0400, "Vito" said:

Gee, you're right Dave. It's crazy to assume that any local authority
looked
at each person before turning them over to Americans or that some
American
authority did the same before flying each one to Gitmo then feeding,
clothing and sheltering them, some for years.

No, Vito, that's not the problem. It's nonsense to characterize that kind
of
"looking at" as a hearing. And it insults your readers' intelligence to
expect them to be fooled by such transparent sophistry.

One cannot impose the Anglo-American court system on other cultures. A man I
knew got drunk and wrecked his car in Mexico. The was tried under Mexican
law and sent to prison without being asked to testify or even see the inside
of the courtroom. The Judge felt he had all the info needed to convict
without it. When his relatives complained the US Government told them tough
****. If you don't like Mexican law then don't do crimes in Mexico. I
understand that France, Italy, Spain and other democracies are the same.

Friends who work(ed) in Muslim countries say it's even stricter there. Their
employer advised them to get out of the country at the first sign of trouble
rather than face local justice. One of them narrowly escaped when the taxi
he hired had a wreck. He was spirited out before a mullah could decide it
was his fault and have him killed! You or I may not like it but that's why I
don't go to these places.

Now what is going to happen to (say) a Sudanese who went to Afghanistan to
enjoy the Taliban paradise, murdering women for literacy, who gets caught
leading a band of ununiformed foreigners and Afghans shooting and killing
other Afghans? Are they going to convene a court and let him pick a jury as
we do here? Hell no! The local tribal chief and mullah are going to agree on
his guilt and cut his head off out of hand. Should the US intervene in local
law and custom to save him? I think not.

But US Intel looks at him and decides he may have info that could help
prevent another 9/11 or English or Spanish terror attack, so we ask the
Afghans to loan him to us. Now, what do we owe this guy? A fair trial under
US law?

One might argue that we shouldn't have intervened at all - that we should
have let the Afghans kill him - and in light of current events I'd have to
agree. Perhaps we should simply put the lot of them to death, but imagine
the howls from the bleeding-heart do gooders then. Do you think we should
let them go?