Is anyone else tired of the hypocritical rhetoric regarding the ‘war’ on terror? I’m tired of the ’spin doctors’ who twist words in order to play with the public’s impressions. It’s one thing to use words carefully in order to clarify one’s meaning; quite another to use them to obscure meaning. Let’s take a look at this ‘war on terror’ as an example of what I’m talking about.
Again today I heard on the radio how the Guantanamo detainees aren’t entitled to Geneva Convention protections because they’re not considered “lawful combatants” under the Geneva Convention. I think this distinction is irrelevant because there are no “lawful combatants” in this supposed ‘war’ in the first place!
The idea of an “unlawful combatant” is nowhere defined in the Geneva Conventions. Instead, it’s implied by the explicit definition of a “lawful combatant” in GC3, Articles 4 and 5 (see Wikipedia article Unlawful Combatant for details). There is no explicit definition for an unlawful combatant except in contrast to lawful combatants.
How can you have a ‘war’ without any ‘lawful combatants’ to engage? In fact, you can’t. What you have, instead, are a group of people engaged in criminal activity. In other words, this ‘war on terror’ is nothing more than an international police action that’s using the military instead of the CIA, Interpol, etc.
So all this talk by the administration that the detainees being held in Guantanamo are not entitled to Geneva Convention protections is rubbish because there is no legitimate context for calling what we’re doing a war. A rose by any other name, right? If it looks like a rose, and smells like a rose, etc., then calling it a petunia, or a townhouse, is really irrelevant: it’s a rose, and shall ever be a rose, no matter what other words one may choose to label it.
The same principle applies to this administration’s attemtp at grand deception by calling an international police effort a ‘war’. It cannot be a war unless there are lawful combatants to engage. I can’t stress it enough: no lawful combatants, no war. Period.
Now then, we’re no longer talking about whether the ‘prisoners of war’ being detained in Guantanamo and elsewhere are entitled to legal representation, etc., because there is no war, hence there are no prisoners of war. What we have are criminals, apprehended by the military forces authorized to conduct international police business.
And criminals can only be held so long without being charged… criminals have rights… criminals are entitled to legal representation, regardless of how heinous their crimes. That’s how our system was designed to function, and that’s what American was built on, and ought to stand for. To stand for anything less seems anti-Constitutional to me, and by implication anti-American.
Anyone who tells you differently is very likely trying to sell you something.
3 responses so far ↓
1 Maurice // Jul 12, 2006 at 11:45 pm
My only concern with your addressing this issue is that by doing so you’re granting their arguments some credence. I know it sounds silly to say that, but it’s like my continual poking at Ann Coulter. I don’t argue Mr. Coulter’s points because doing so would lend some weight to what he has to say. Rather, I like to poke fun at how much he looks girlish and screeches like a harpy when he speaks.
All kidding aside…I agree with you that it’s silly for our current administration to argue that they can just pick folks up on the battlefield and toss them in some remote prison camp far from concerned organizations and people and the media and torture them for sport in the hope that they’ll say something worth 1% of the damage that’s being done to our reputation and standing in the world.
There are enough cases of people that weren’t even fighting that were captured and tortured both in Afghanistan by warlords and then again by the CIA in Gitmo to make me sick, all in the name of “freedom”, fancy that…
In terms of wars and un-American activity, I am reminded of two statements made by Eisenhower when he was president:
“Un-American activity cannot be prevented or routed out by employing un-American methods; to preserve freedom we must use the tools that freedom provides.”
“All of us have heard this term ‘preventative war’ since the earliest days of Hitler. I recall that is about the first time I heard it. In this day and time… I don’t believe there is such a thing; and, frankly, I wouldn’t even listen to anyone seriously that came in and talked about such a thing.”
Indeed, as human beings, those captured and held at Gitmo have basic, fundamental rights that cannot be infringed upon or taken away from them. These are the same rights we afford every single criminal in this country, even the rapists and murderers, and they are the rights that those held at Gitmo should have too.
2 Richard // Jul 13, 2006 at 9:42 am
Hmm… on the matter of granting an idea credence by addressing it, I think the risk is minimal because the majority of the public already believes that we’re at ‘war’. If relatively few people believed we were at war then raising the issue to debunk it might, as you suggested, bolster its credibility and consequently sway some who did not believe it into changing their mind.
By raising an issue that is already held by a majority of people, I hope to raise awareness and inspire debate. In order to wage a war there must be a lawful combatant to engage; no lawful combatant, no war.
As for a battlefield, there isn’t one. The ‘enemy’ we profess to engage is a loosely organized band of criminals, not a military force aligned with any particular government or nation. Again, to hammer the point home, the terrorists are not considered lawful combatants; that makes their actions criminal in nature, and the task of apprehending them a matter of law enforcement, not war.
I like your Eisenhower quotes, particularly the one about ‘preventative war’; I hadn’t heard either of them before.
With the Supreme Court declaring that the Guantanamo detainees are entitled to challenge their detention via habeus corpus, we’re a step closer to reverting back to the America I believed in, and for that I’m somewhat encouraged and grateful.
I think we need to take this a step further, however, and stop calling this international police action a ‘war’. As long as it’s called a ‘war’, those apprehended by the military will be considered ‘prisoners of war’. And as ‘prisoners of war’, they will be categorized as unlawful combatants by the Geneva Convention and subsequently lose any of the rights that they would be entitled to if they were, instead, recognized as suspects apprehended during an international police action.
That’s the anticipated path of abuses that I’m most concerned about right now.
And now that the Supreme Court has ruled as it has, all current ‘prisoners of war’ being held in facilities not covered by Federal jurisdiction will remain in those facilities where the Supreme Court’s ruling does not reach; additionally, all future ‘prisoners of war’ will be detained in facilities not under Federal jurisdiction so as to avoid granting them the legal rights and remedies that the Supreme Court has just ruled that they are entitled to.
The reason that the Supreme Court’s ruling applies to the detainees in Guantanamo was explained in the Court’s majority opinion:
We’re tracking criminals internationally, not engaged in a war. Failure to draw this distinction places our Constitutional protections beneath the whims of a president who has found a certain dictatorial privelage by invoking his ‘war powers’ privelages (which he can only do if we’re at war, yes?). Until people realize that we are not at war, the dictator will continue to seize a little power here, encroach upon a little liberty there, until—under the guise of being ‘at war’—our Constitution shall be rendered impotent.
3 MauriceReeves.com // Jul 15, 2006 at 12:21 am
And On The Home Front…
On our home front, two of the big news stories that I should be blogging about are the Supreme Court’s narrow rebuke of the President’s detention of people in the name of this “war on terror” and the compromise that……
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