• 2.08K Posts
  • 2.34K Comments
Joined 3 年前
cake
Cake day: 2023年6月12日

help-circle



  • Related

    “I don’t know why the president decided to do this, [but] I think the outcome was exactly the right outcome,” Jeffries said in an interview with CNN.

    The remarks are a stark contrast from Jeffries’s criticisms of the scores of other pardons Trump has offered — mostly to his political allies — throughout his second term. Jeffries, joined by most Democrats in his caucus, has bashed those reprieves as both an affront to the nation’s criminal justice system and more evidence that the Trump administration is the most “corrupt” in the country’s history.

    But in the case of Cuellar, the Democratic leader has taken a softer approach. And Wednesday, following Trump’s pardon, Jeffries questioned the legitimacy of the corruption charges against him.

    “Listen, the reality is [that] this indictment was very thin to begin with, in my view,” Jeffries told CNN. “The charges were eventually going to be dismissed — if not at the trial court level [then] by the Supreme Court, as they’ve repeatedly done in instances just like this.”

    https://archive.is/1Zsoa







  • The US has been using this kind of logic since Sept 12 2001 (arc)

    SACHA PFEIFFER, HOST:

    After the attacks on September 11, 2001, the George W. Bush administration arrested hundreds of suspected terrorists. Most of them were never criminally charged and eventually let go. Some spent years in inhumane conditions, even though they had no connection to the Taliban or al-Qaida. In 2002, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld visited Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where many of those prisoners were being held, and described them using this term.

    (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

    DONALD RUMSFELD: And one of the most important aspects of the Geneva Convention is the distinction between lawful combatants and unlawful combatants.

    PFEIFFER: By labeling them unlawful combatants, the U.S. said it was justified in holding them indefinitely without trial and denying them international legal protections. The Trump administration is now applying the same term to people on board boats it’s blowing up because it says they’re transporting drugs from South America. The language here matters. It underpins the legal arguments presidents make to justify their actions. Here’s current Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth referring to the cartels that ship drugs from the southern hemisphere to the United States.

    (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

    PETE HEGSETH: So our message to these foreign terrorist organizations is we will treat you like we have treated al-Qaida.

    A lot more good information and history in that article, but the important point is that because they’re not soldiers (i.e. lawful combatants), they don’t get Geneva Convention protection, but because they’re not criminals either they don’t get due process protection either. It’s a completely blatant and stupid way to just ditch all the humanitarian guardrails around government violence we spent the 20th century building, it was fucked 20 years ago and it’s fucked today but we never held the people doing it accountable so here we are.