Re: Airport insanity
From: "James A. Donald" <jamesd@echeque.com> Sent: Oct 20, 2004 3:10 PM To: "cypherpunks@al-qaeda.net" <cypherpunks@al-qaeda.net> Subject: Re: Airport insanity
Lots of murderous terrorists have been released from Guatanamo, and in the nearly all cases the most serious of their complaints make it sound like a beach resort, except for the fact that they could not leave.
Maybe I missed that. All but one of the comments I read about involved a lot of complaints about mistreatment, albeit often with the admission that Gitmo was still better than being in an Afghan prison. As a nitpick, though, it's not at all clear that most of the people at Gitmo were really terrorists, or even murderers. None of them has had a trial, few have even had hearings, and many were released as not a threat to us. (They may still be a threat to everyone else around them.)
A few have more serious complaints. Either they are lying or, those who say they were well treated apart from being held captive are lying.
Surely the other alternative is that only some prisoners are subjected to torture, e.g., the ones that look to have some serious intelligence value.
James A. Donald
--John
-- On 22 Oct 2004 at 0:00, John Kelsey wrote:
All but one of the comments I read about involved a lot of complaints about mistreatment, albeit often with the admission that Gitmo was still better than being in an Afghan prison. As a nitpick, though, it's not at all clear that most of the people at Gitmo were really terrorists, or even murderers.
Most of them were non Afghans in Afghanistan in the middle of a war and no plausible explanation of their presence, which makes it fairly certain they had signed up Bin Laden and company. So if they had not personally targeted women and children, they had signed up with an organization that they know rapes and murders. Don't give me that moral relativism crap that their view of themselves as heroes is as just as valid as our view of them as vicious subhuman monsters.
None of them has had a trial, few have even had hearings, and many were released as not a threat to us. (They may still be a threat to everyone else around them.)
Different rules apply in war. Now if the president got away with the principle that an "enemy combatant captured in time of war" is anyone the president designates as an enemy combatant, *then* I would be worried about the fact that they did not get trials and all that. In a guerilla war or terrorist war, war rules are even more dangerous to liberty than usual since the battlefield is everywhere. However in this case the application of the rules of war, rather than peace, is legitimate. They are for the most part foreigners picked up in Afghanistan, where the usual wartime rule is that if you cannot give a plausible account of yourself, they will skin you. While we should be very concerned that the chronic war on terror may lead to rules of war extending to everyday life, rules of war are still necessary to deal with large scale enemies with the capability to control territory and exclude the forces of justice. We should not apply rules of war to some terrorists snatched in New York - that would be dangerous to the freedom of the ordinary New Yorker, but if the government snatches terrorists in Afghanistan or near Fallujah, rules of war should apply. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG L9l0XwGGAOnDTD1f/nlXg15rkevzTJFhQEhPA0e1 4HxKjMzjQlUTID/enTbsses+z2wda2UXVev2ZKUSS
participants (2)
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James A. Donald -
John Kelsey