No Bill of Rights in the UK?

We signed the European Convention on Human Rights in 1950.
We incorporated these rights straight into our Constitution with the Human Rights Act 2000.

Hell, in 1215 the Magna Carta was signed, which included the right to Appeal.

1. We already have closed borders. You need out permission to legally come to the US. No need to change that, just increase the information needed to get in. use better technology, and the CIA to make sure you know who is trying to harm us.

2. and 3. This is what the UN is for. Let them deal with it, and just be a player in it. So for all the troops that fight for the UN, the same number will be from your country (and everyone else's), as from mine. They will hate the world, not just the US.

We will be saving hundreds of billions  a year if we remove our military force from the rest of the world. Spend some of that to actually protect us.

we ned to xepand the  shuman rihts act!

more freedsom for the peoples!!!!!

Haha scifiboys drunk again... let the awesome commence lol

Taken from the Constitution:

Section 9 - Limits on Congress

The Migration or Importation of such Persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit, shall not be prohibited by the Congress prior to the Year one thousand eight hundred and eight, but a tax or duty may be imposed on such Importation, not exceeding ten dollars for each Person.

The privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.

No Bill of Attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed.

The Constitution says you can do this.  The problem with the Bush Adminstration's approach is that they went behind the other branches of government's backs to do this.  Congress is the only one with this power to suspend habeas corpus.  If Congress approves a limited suspension of habeas corpus rights, there is no violation of the Constitution if done in the appropriate time ("when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.")  The courts also need to be able to oversee these decisions and have people challenge whether or not the executive branch has properly exercised these rights.

There was no legal framework put forth by the Bush Adminstration for determing when this was appropriate and who this power could be used upon.  They were just lumping everyone together and suspending all of their habeas corpus rights, including American citizens.  Obama is proposing a system under which their are strict criteria authorized by Congress that must be met for this to apply, and the courts must be able to oversee this decision.  That is completely consistent with the Constitution.  The Bush Adminstration just did this all unilaterally without any authorization or oversight from the other branches of government.

Its not violating the Constitution if you do what the Constitution requires you to do.

I see,

Funny that the entire time you have argued against what the Bush administration did, it was what we were doing to people, not that we didn't have a law in place to do it. Now that your guy is in office, if we pass laws to treat people the exact same way we have been treating them for the last 6+ years, you're OK with it.

So in your eyes, raping women is bad, but if a law passed that said it was legal to rape women, then it's OK?

(yea, it's an extreme to prove a point, I know you would not be ok with it)

About the UN: If it was up to them nothing would ever get done. Between the Security Council and their power of veto and its capacity to drag its feet endlessly, these kinds of things would never be stopped.

I always liked the US capacity to go to action when things got rough. Sometimes you cant just sit around and be diplomatic. I think even the people in the UN would bash US' unilateralism publicly but would be happy behind closed doors that someone took care of their dirty work for them.

I would like a major overhaul in the UN so we wouldnt be so dependent on the US, but frankly, I dont see it happening.

I think if the US would do what you said, it would be good for the US but bad for the world.

Since I am a brazilian, Im gonna have to disagree with you.

I thought the way Bush did it was too broad and wouldn't have been able to fly even if he had gone to Congress and the courts.  Obama is reserving this for the 10-15% of detainees where this is truly a problem, not 100% of them like Bush did until the Supreme Court ruled on the issue and the Bush Administration had to let a lot of people go.

Extreme times sometimes call for extreme measures, but if you are going to use extreme measures, there is an appropriate way to do so.  Congress is directly accountable to the voters every two years.  If they approve something, the voters can express their disaproval pretty quickly.  And anything that goes through Congress typically becomes public records.  Every law passed by Congress is public domain.  The executive branch, on the other hand, has broad latitude to hide things.  Fortunately Obama is trying to narrow the scope of "executive privilege" to just hide things, though at the moment his legal people kind of have to make do with the legal memos they have on hand.

And having the courts oversee the process is huge.  Its like letting a kid run wild in the house over the weekend and he throws a party and trashes the place versus hiring a babysitter.  It makes a big damn difference.

Going to Congress means that the public knows what is going on and how exactly it is supposed to work.  Getting the courts involved prevents abuse of what is a power that should only be used in the most extreme circumstances.

I don't necessarily approve of everything Obama is doing in this department, but at least he is doing it the right way.  That does matter as it does have consequences.  And frankly its just more honest.

I think this article gives a good view of the other side:

Obama's 'None Of the Above' Terror Policy

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/22/AR2009052201894.html?sub=AR

President Obama is:

(a) A disappointing sellout to conservatives, someone who ran promising to reverse the Bush administration's excesses in the war on terrorism and has now embraced them.
This Story

(b) A dangerous liberal whose naive views about playing nicely with terrorists threaten national security.

A kinder, gentler George W. Bush, hewing largely to the previous administration's terrorism policies while wrapping them in more pleasing rhetoric.

The president has been accused of all three in the past few days, which suggests that the correct answer is:

(d) None of the above. Obama inherited a minefield of difficult legal issues entwined in the war on terrorism, and he has picked his way carefully, intelligently and -- for the most part -- correctly through them.

Indeed, the president's stumbles have been more in the execution than in policy. He risked (and lost) a congressional vote on funding to close the Guantanamo Bay prison before laying the necessary groundwork. He resisted (but only after seeming to open the door to) forming an independent commission to examine interrogation policies; this could have avoided the current distracting drip-drip-drip of information about who knew what when about waterboarding and whether it worked. He was for releasing the photos of detainee abuse before he was against it.

On the merits, though, Obama has mostly called it right. My disagreements concern, in the scheme of things, relatively minor issues -- the reaffirmation of a broad state secrets privilege and the about-face on releasing the photos -- and these are judgment calls the president made on the basis of more information, by definition, than the rest of us have.

Some of the issues that Obama dealt with in his thoughtful speech on Thursday -- how to handle closing Guantanamo, whether to release memos or photographs of abuse -- were messes left for him by the Bush administration. For example, Guantanamo would have been a perfect place to hold detainees and avoid the current outbreak of not-in-my-backyardism were it not for the fact that the Bush administration chose the base not for its remoteness but for its -- or so it thought -- lawlessness.

Had the Bush administration put in place basic elements of due process and fairness from the start, had it not been so determined to exalt executive power at the expense of coequal branches, Guantanamo would not be the toxic symbol it has become. Had the Bush administration not tainted evidence with its "enhanced interrogation techniques," perhaps more detainees -- and the most dangerous of them -- could be tried and convicted.

Other issues are unavoidably difficult -- "tough calls involving competing concerns," as Obama said about balancing openness and security. The hardest of these is the boldest and most controversial part of Obama's blueprint for building a sustainable legal architecture in the war on terrorism: a mechanism for holding detainees who cannot be tried or released.

The thought of a preventive detention regime should make everyone queasy -- except that the alternatives (freeing dangerous individuals who for various reasons cannot be tried or the current, failing system) should make everyone queasier.

So the caricatures of answers (a) "disappointing sellout" and (b) "naive liberal" are both wrong. Sometimes -- ending the use of "enhanced interrogation techniques," releasing the Office of Legal Counsel memos on the same -- he has embraced the "liberal" side. Sometimes -- reaffirming a broad state secrets privilege, reviving military commissions, envisioning a legal mechanism for preventive detention -- he has come down on the "conservative" side.

Which makes "kinder, gentler Bush" the most intriguing wrong answer. This argument has been made most extensively by Jack Goldsmith, head of the Office of Legal Counsel under George W. Bush. Writing in the New Republic, Goldsmith asserted that Obama has "copied most of the Bush program, has expanded some of it, and has narrowed only a bit. Almost all of the Obama changes have been at the level of packaging, argumentation, symbol, and rhetoric."

This is true only if you define "the Bush program" as what the courts and, to a shamefully lesser extent, Congress, had forced Bush to do by the end of his administration. Even similar-looking positions contain important differences whose significance Goldsmith minimizes. Obama suspended and then revived the military tribunals that Bush put in place -- but with improvements on excluding information obtained by coercion, limiting the use of hearsay and expanding access to lawyers.

More important, where Bush resisted any encroachments on executive power, Obama welcomes sharing power and responsibility. "Our goal is not to avoid a legitimate legal framework. In our constitutional system, prolonged detention should not be the decision of any one man," he said. "If and when we determine that the United States must hold individuals to keep them from carrying out an act of war, we will do so within a system that involves judicial and congressional oversight."

That's not glitzy rhetoric cloaking the same old policy. It's smart change, dangerously overdue.

Personally, I don't want to get into a partisan debate at the moment ...

I do find it amusing that Obama was so critical of George W. Bush's "Ad Hoc Legal Approah" towards terrorism, when he has demonstrated an "Ad Hoc Legal Approah" towards the economy and (as the video suggests) seems to be demonstrating his own "Ad Hoc Legal Approah" towards the war on terror.

If I was an optimist I would probably get hopeful that both sides of the political spectrum would start understanding why the unchecked powers held by the government in general (and the executive branch in particular) were dangerous ... Unfortunately, I'm a realist and I understand that as long as people are willing to believe the unrealistic promises of politicians that we will never see a reduction in the size of the government or in the power it holds.