Fair enough.
Perhaps you can be the first ever to explain to us why this is a “war” (and on a tactic, terrorism, rather than a nation), not a police action against an organized crime syndicate. Hmm?
How about the spirit of the convention, then? Does that matter? How about the letter or the spirit of our own damn Constitution and laws? Do they ever enter into the discussion for you?
It’s very convenient to use the out you just described to avoid accepting responsibility for being better than the people you oppose. Bricker/Shodan-type potshots don’t cut it, either.
Um, he’s not avoiding accepting the responsibility - he’s suggesting that calling them POWs would still be morally/geneva convention-spiritually problematic.
That’s not his point.
wars between state actors either
a) end in a victory for one side
b) end in a formal cease fire and everyone stops hostilities
c) operate perpetually
wars against an ideology only end once the war-waging party has decided that they’ve “won”
with conventional war, there will be a time when POWs are repatriated, either by cessation of hostilities, or prisoner exchanges if there are truly perpetual wars. neither of those two things can occur in asymetric wars against abstract concepts
Surely, in the absence of any evidence that they were previously terrorists, then we can’t treat them as returning to terrorism. So in the absence of fair trials, a former Gitmo detainee committing a terrorist act will be a sobering reminder that imprisoning innocent people can turn them into terrorists.
In case there are people who haven’t got the word yet, the wars are over. And we won. We declared war on Afghanistan; we invaded the country, we overthrew the Taliban, and the country is now being run by a coalition that is our ally. Same thing in Iraq; invasion, overthrow, dismantling WMDs, executions, new government. The President went on TV and said the mission was accomplished.
So it’s time to let the POWs go. Their war is over.
But what about the terrorists, you ask? That’s simple. It turns out killing people and blowing things up is against the law. You arrest the terrorists (this should be easy because according to conservative sources, we’ve already done that). Then you have a trial and put them in prison like Ramzi Yousef. Or execute them like Timothy McVeigh. Or let them go if they don’t get convicted. But we have a legal system and it works, even against terrorists.
Really? You’d think a thing like that would have made the news. I’m not aware of any formal declarations of war by the U.S. since WWII. Perhaps you’d be kind enough to provide a cite?
I don’t know enough details about it to form a really complete opinion, but my shoot-from-the-hip position is: no. Unless there is some outrageously egregious reason to oppose any given nominee, the President has the right to appoint his executive officers. Elections have consequences. I doubt I personally would have picked whoever Obama’s choice is, based solely on the differing points in the political spectrum that Obama and I occupy. But he’s the President, and that should mean he gets to pick his team to carry out his agenda.
I’ve mentioned it in other threads, but Bush, Obama, the United Nations, NATO, and the US Supreme Court all agree it’s an “armed conflict” (aka “war”) against al qaeda. Policy decisions will determine how you want to treat it (military response, police response, no response). So why is it a “war” against an organized crime syndicate? because people determined AQ’s actions rose to the level of an act of war and we responded with overwhelming military force = armed conflict = confers right of military necessity = indefinite detentions of your enemy, killing as a measure of first resort, ect. ect. ect.
Excellent point and I hope the spirit of the conventions make a comeback. There’s this old clause in the Hague conventions called the “Martens Clause”; basically it states, “we know the treaty we just wrote is not going to be complete nor perfect nor can it predict future changes, but the spirit of what we are trying to do should not be ignored.” I would wager this clause was overlooked by the previous administration.
Do we know why the planners were interred in the first place and why they were released?
Senators Lieberman, McCain And Graham Ask Obama To Halt Transfer Of Yemeni Gitmo Detainees
I do wonder the extent to which the claim that “These six individuals have been identified as threats to the United States and its allies due to their connections to the Al Qaeda terrorist network.” is based on gossiup, rumor and hearsay. Our hit rate with Guantanamo inmates has not been high, but I suppose it is possible that at least some of these 6 are actually al Qaeda involved.
were we releasing their spirit or something?
And what about wars against tactics?
I would put that in the same category, obviously. But I don’t think it’s a war on a tactic.
You can lose the snark. A fair reading of your post would leave the reader thinking you did NOT know that Obama hadn’t abandoned the Bush policy of indefinite detention.
OK, here’s something a bit odd about the ABC report that launched this thread.
I quote:
I was wondering who these guys were, so I went looking for other press mentions of these men. Just about the first thing I found was an Air Force Times reprint of an AP item datelined Feb. 17th 2009, that discusses the capture, in Yemen, of one Abu al-Hareth Muhammad al-Oufi. The article goes on to say this:
The article states that al-Oufi/al-Harbi surrendered to Yemeni authorities after appearing in an al-Qaida video in January; he was then turned over the Saudis. Assuming he’s still in Saudi custody, exactly how would he be in a position to mastermind the crotch-bombing from Yemen?
I’m beginning to suspect the story this thread is based on is a bit garbled, to say the least. I’ll look around a bit more and see if there’s anything else of interest.
Terrorism? Terrorism is certainly a tactic. It’s not an ideology or a group of people. It’s a tactic.
Let us know if anyone named ‘curveball’ puts in an appearance.
It’s not as if this’d be the first time we Americans have been manipulated in regard to foreign threats to our security.
yes but the “war on terror” isn’t a war against terrorism, wherever it comes from. it’s more properly described as a war against “islamic extremism” (whatever the fuck that means) but that doesn’t sound sexy enough.
Actually it’s sexier than ‘terror’ it’s just not politically correct enough. Because American policy is not allowed to single out ethnic groups.