There is so much information that I read in a day, especially since writing on WIS, that upon reflection, it is daunting. When I checked out the New York Times today and saw their article "In Terror Cases, Administration Sets Own Rules," I realized that I have neither kept abreast of nor heard much about this topic as I should. I mean I see updates about Gitmo and the magic of torture they do there, but I haven’t really stayed on the "enemy combatant" treatment of detainees.
no one outside the administration knows just how the determination is made whether to handle a terror suspect as an enemy combatant or as a common criminal, to hold him indefinitely without charges in a military facility or to charge him in court.
Indeed, citing the need to combat terrorism, the administration has argued, with varying degrees of success, that judges should have essentially no role in reviewing its decisions. The change in Mr. Padilla’s status, just days before the government’s legal papers were due in his appeal to the Supreme Court, suggested to many legal observers that the administration wanted to keep the court out of the case.
The courts have given the executive branch substantial but not total deference, often holding that the president has the authority to designate enemy combatants but allowing those detained to challenge the factual basis for the administration’s determinations. Some courts have suggested that a detainee’s citizenship, the place he was captured and whether he was fighting American troops should play a role in how aggressively the courts review enemy-combatant designations.
One of the problems with fighting a "War on Terror" or a war on any intangible concept, I guess even a national identity, is that how do you treat those you capture and those who may or may not be your enemy. There is no nation of terror. There is no hope for diplomacy. We call them detainees, not POWS, yet we treat them as "enemy combatants" and subject them to rather harsh military laws, affording them none of America’s civil liberties (which I thought were to be a universal ideal anyway) - how can we treat someone else any different than we should treat our own citizens?
And then who decides who is a Terrorist, and thus strip away their rights? It’s like our judicial system dealing with insanity - a doctor declares them unfit to stand trial or a jury find them mentally incompetent or whatever and then they are in no one’s jurisdiction except the mental health profession.
This is the OG Catch-22 revamped for our White-Paranoia-driven regime. The president declares someone a terrorist, and that person has no recourse, no jury of peers to verify the allegation, can be subjected to ineffectual torture until they confess to something they perhaps didn’t do, and its the inquisition and McCarthyism rolled into one.
I know it’s not that extreme, however, this is what due process is for, and by denying those we face the same liberties and procedures afforded our own citizens, we lower ourselves to something other than a democracy.
We become tyrannical.
And in some cases (see above) we’re talking about American citizens held as detainees - not tried for treason, but held as enemy combatants. Now that is just patently absurd. If they are citizens acting as enemy combatants then they are guilty of treason, and should be tried accordingly.
Flouting Geneva will earn us nothing but the contempt of other nations and a wad of much-deserved shame.
This has been Andy D.
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