A Level Gaze

A Level Gaze

"What effect must it have on a nation if it learns no foreign languages? Probably much the same as that which a total withdrawal from society has upon an individual."
--G.C. Lichtenberg

Wednesday, August 14, 2002

The point behind the abrogation of rights of "enemy combatants" is this: if you have enemy combatants, it is presumed you're at war, and have better things to do than dig up lawyers, convene trials, and go through all the niceties of constitutional courtroom procedure. It's also presumed that, until recently, the guy in the brig was on the other side of a battlefield with a bunch of other guys, all of them shooting at you. That is the difference between battlefield law and 'normal' law. Nothing else has changed. Not the nature of truth, the means of getting at it, nor the means of avoiding falsehood. All of which are pretty well provided for in our 'normal' legal system, should one be interested in getting at the truth.

It is considered barbaric to kill off prisoners of war, or even to treat them badly. For the grave offense of taking up arms against our country, we punish enemy combatants in actual wars with...nothing. Just imprisonment until the end of the war or a swap of prisoners, and that's it. Notice is taken of the honor of fighting for one's country, even if it is against our own, and the prisoners are released. We go to war with a country, a government; we do not assign the blame for instigating or perpetuating it to the individual soldiers. Kill them on the battlefield until your heart's content, but when they surrender, they become POWs.

Our government has been careful to refer to those captured in the War on Terrorism as "detainees," and not prisoners of war, to avoid the strictures of the Geneva Convention, to allow the prisoners to be held incommunicado, without hearings or trials, indefinitely. Apparently, all the evidence it takes to do so is a two-page letter from "a special advisor to the undersecretary of defense for policy." In such letters, it is to be assumed, facts are self-evident, and not in need of corroboration. If I'm sitting and minding my own business here in New York and they come for me and throw me into a cell, all that needs to happen is for someone to call me an enemy combatant, and it's over. I'm as good as dead, and my family may never find out what happened to me. As Judge Doumar pointed out, there's nothing stopping the feds from putting Hamdi in a vat of boiling oil.

If we assume that Hamdi, Padilla and the rest are, in fact, "enemy combatants," then we have no right to punish them at all. The Taliban has been defeated, and under international law they are to be released. If they are not, then they are entitled to the rights and protections guaranteed in the United States Constitution. It's as simple as that.

posted by David at 8/14/2002 04:26:00 PM ::

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