Airport insanity

James A. Donald jamesd at echeque.com
Sat Oct 23 11:23:17 PDT 2004


    --
On 22 Oct 2004 at 11:12, Bill Stewart wrote:
> James - Many, perhaps most, of the POWs at Gitmo weren't
> foreigners, they were Afghans.  Many of the POWs at Gitmo
> probably were Al-Qaeda or other organized paramilitary
> groups.  But many of them were described by the US
> propagandists as "Taliban fighters" - the military arm of the
> local central government who were "legitimate" to the extent
> that any group of warlords who are the current king of the
> hill are legitimate,

Firstly, much of the Taliban is Pakistani, not Afghan.

Secondly, if the Taliban were legitimate, their enemies may
lock them up for the duration of the war as POWs, Since some
elements of the Taliban have not laid down their arms, Taliban
prisoners may held for the duration, as POWs, even if they
fought in a manner equivalent to fighting in uniform.

The Taliban were illegitimate, not on legal grounds, but
because they were evil.

 If someone was in the Taliban, then those threatened by the
Taliban have a strong case for locking him up, just as we
locked up nazis. Thirdly a government that systematically
depopulates large areas of the territory it supposedly rules is
not as legitimate as warlords with genuine local roots and
traditional authority, who for the most part came to power
through religious or military leadership in a spontaneous
revolution against tyranny.  No one in the Northern alliance
ever controlled territory though ethnic cleansing.

I can easily imagine circumstances where ethnic cleansing is a
legitimate response to an intransigent enemy with strong roots
in the local population - but the fact that the Taliban used
such measures shows they did not have strong roots in the local
population. 

    --digsig
         James A. Donald
     6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
     CDUSjXr1dmDzlVeda1332HqM96GZ31CTX2n8IhAm
     4Cc7h7PYP1ZhoxEDC8UNo32CFcXQrpBdEEegTPYZ1





More information about the cypherpunks-legacy mailing list