Airport insanity

[James A. Donald]

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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.

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         James A. Donald
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