At 06:15 PM 06/17/2003 -0500, Harmon Seaver wrote:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/2998870.stm
"With Iraq's judicial system in disarray after the end of the war, Paul Bremer
said a special criminal court would be set up.
He said the court would try people, "in particular senior Baathists... may
have
committed crimes against the coalition, who are trying to destabilise the
situation"."
So you invade a country, and the patriots who resist you are no longer
soldiers, even guerillas, but "criminals" to be tried in the US's weird new
courts, probably secretly with no representation.
Yup. And USA Today was referring to the US military reserve soldiers
who were sent there as "Citizen Soldiers", but of course
*Iraqis* who fought the invaders weren't "citizen soldiers",
they were "terrorists" or "illegal combatants" or "evil" or
"failing to act sufficiently French by surrendering".
And since the US Constitution doesn't apply to
US forces operating outside the US, there's no prohibition
against "ex post facto" laws about "crimes against the coalition",
and of course the Bush Administration bullied Brussels into exempting
their armed forces from war crimes laws.
