I was debating with my friends last night if the 9/11 should have been treated as a crime instead of an act of war. Timothy Mcveigh attacked the federal government, but he was arrested and tried in a civilian court. The first WTC bombing was done by foreign combatants, but was treated as a crime. Boston may have felt like a war zone on 4/19/13, but those events were very serious crimes, not war.
How is it determined? Obviously a military attack like Pearl Harbor is an act of war, but that was not the case on 9/11. The hijackers were not soldiers.
Wars happen between states. Terrorism on the other hand is a political act taken by non state players against an established government.
I know this. Let me rephrase my initial question. What are the criteria for the Federal Government of the United States treating a terrorist attack as an act of war instead of a crime? Al-Qaeda is not a state, and never was, so 9/11 still fits the definition of terrorism.
Terrorism is (sometimes) treated as an act of war when it is backed by a state actor.
The notion here is that (for example) it would make no sense to allow 1940s era Japan to “back” a hypothetical “Nisei Liberation Front” in placing Japanese- made bombs in US cities, while denying any involvement and, if the US complains, saying ‘shit, that’s a criminal matter - just hunt down those criminals, it has nothing to do with us’. That would allow the aggressor state to engage in war by proxy, without suffering any retribution or deterrence.
Whenever possible, I believe the government treats terrorism as a crime.
9/11 could not be treated as a crime because the Afghani government would not extradite the people involved in the attack. We went to war with the Taliban to kill or capture those who planned and executed the attack and to remove a government that was going to support further attacks.
the first WTC bombing, McVeigh, etc. all could be easily treated as crimes because we were able to apprehend the suspects without resorting to military force.
We use the military in failed states because whatever government there is in these places cannot help us. We use the military where the terrorists are actually an army.
I think that overall we use whatever is practically available to us and cheapest, Iraq War excepted.
The criteria is whatever the elected representatives of the American people want it to be. There is not a treaty, law, or constitutional requirement that limits what the government is allowed to judge as an act of war by a foreign party, as opposed to a crime committed by a foreign party.
In this particular case, Al Qaeda had made several large, lethal attacks against American interests before 9/11. The murder of 3,000 people certainly made it clear that the attacks were unlikely to stop unless the United States destroyed the organization, so Congress and the President passed the AUMF that essentially declared war on Al Qaeda (for all practical purposes).
There’s nothing stopping a future Congress from repealing that war authorization, other than the unpopularity of that view.
al-Qaida was, according to the United States, being hosted and given support by the de facto government of Afghanistan, the Taliban. So in that sense it can be argued the USA had a casus belli against Afghanistan.
The federal government of the United States has no defined “Criteria” for what constitutes an act of war and what does not. Nor, so far as I am aware, does any government. Every government will react as the political, military and diplomatic situation merits.
A great definition of terrorism I saw as a war crime in the absence of a (traditionally defined) war.
The difference, as has been noted, is that in the case of AQ they were involved closely with the Taliban, the then defacto government of Afghanistan. AQ had bases in Afghanistan for training and C&C, were given support by the Taliban and even had several leadership positions in the Taliban government. When the US demanded that the Taliban turn over ranking AQ commanders, including ObL, the Taliban refused. All of this made it completely different than Timothy McVeigh who basically acted alone wrt foreign government involvement as well as the first WTC bombers. So, it’s kind of an apples to orangutans comparison on your part.
And, of course, there really would have been no way to send the police into Afghanistan to find and capture AQ leadership in any case, so it’s kind of a silly moot point. Hell, sending in the military didn’t work that great…at least not the way Bush et al tried to do it, i.e. relying on local Afghan forces to do the bulk of the ground fighting and hold AQ in place while we wiped them out.
Keep in mind that the U.S. has a long history of engaging non-state actors in violent ways that were certainly not law-enforcement like activities. The one example that immediately springs to mind is Jefferson’s attacks on Barbary Coast pirates starting around 1805.
Except when it comes to the rights of the accused. The US calls them “Unlawful Combatants”, which places them in a legal limbo where they have the protections of neither P.O.W.s or accused criminals. This allows the government to hold them indefinitely without charge, try them by military courts, use “interrogation” methods that would be considered torture in any other context, and occasionally keep the fact that they’re prisoners secret so as to not compromise intelligence operations.:dubious:
Those people are not American citizens. We don’t have to do anything for them, and it’s not my problem these people attack us without organizing in such a way that they should clearly be treated according to the rules of the Geneva Convention or our civilian court system.
Now that we are aware of this legal limbo we need to come up with a system that protects these people under our care from the worthless brutality you listed in your post.
How do you know these people have attacked you, without due process? Just becomes someone, somewhere said they were involved is enough for you? Why not applying this efficient method to any suspect of any crime? A LEO said this guy is likely a criminal, so, detention without trial but with torture is all fine and dandy?
You’re just sitting on your own country’s basic values. As I wrote before, if, when i joined this board, I had predicted that people would be indefinitely detained by the USA without due process and tortured on top of it in the near future, I would have been laughed out of the message board by American posters stating that there was not a snowball’s chance in hell that such a thing could happen in their country.
How quick so many of you have been to forget your principles and defend ideas like “if an unknown intelligence officer says that someone is guilty, then he is, and this person obviously deserves any bad thing that happens to him”, which used to be a reasonning more typical of military dictatorships or the Soviet Union.
Isn’t or wasn’t it technically treated as both? Had Osama bin Laden wandered onto US soil, for instance, I’m sure he would have been arrested and charged by US authorities with criminal charges with an assortment of law violations.
I think there are two things that tend to separate crime and act of war in terms of terrorism: The scale of the damage done, and whether it is perpetrated by a domestic or foreign entity.
The Oklahoma City bombing by Timothy McVeigh, for instanced, killed over a hundred and was a big terrorist attack, but since McVeigh was a domestic terrorist, it wasn’t really regarded as an act of war, but as a crime.
The 9/11 attacks were both perpetrated by foreign entities and massive in death and destruction, so, clearly perceived as an act of war.
If an al-Qaeda terrorist were to stab an American tourist in a country like Egypt or Yemen, I don’t think it would be regarded so much as an act of war as simply a crime, because it would be considered too small an attack to breach the act-of-war threshold. By which I mean you couldn’t get Congress to assemble and pass an Authorization for Use of Military Force by unanimous vote over the issue of one lone American tourist getting stabbed in the Middle East.
I completely agree. If we are going to arrest people and place them in detention, we should have some sort of process for justifying the detention. Regardless of the means by which we apprehend a person, we shouldn’t torture them. They should be treated humanely for as long as they are held by us. Those are all should’s though.
Initially, our law wasn’t set up to deal with taking these types of people prisoner. The fact that our law was not set up to deal with these situations allowed the abuse of the Bush administration. I believe that issue has mostly been resolved.
It’s completely silly to believe that we are going to be able to defend ourselves from terrorist organizations and expect that we can extend the same protections to every person from California to the Philippines who we feel should be stopped. It’s just not possible, yet we can’t sit on our hands until the government of this or that region can get its shit together and arrest somebody for us. We can’t expect the evidence to be perfect for every person we suspect is a terrorist. We can’t even expect it to always be enough for going beyond a reasonable doubt. We have to capture or kill these people in the manner the best suits the conditions. Sometimes it’s an arrest warrant with copious evidence and sometimes it’s a hellfire missile with nothing more than the word of some local cooperating with us on the ground.
So tourists and immigrants should be thrown in Gitmo, too?
Our justice system has jurisdiction over every crime that occurs in the US or its territories (among others). It makes no distinction between citizens and visitors in the Bill of Rights.
OK, but I believe we’ve covered that with the government will seek to arrest a suspected terrorist if the opportunity to do so is there.
I disagree. I think it absolutely HAS to have an element of at least state sponsorship, if not state involvement to classify as an act of war, regardless of the size.
I mean, if I somehow figured out how to make a nuke out of smoke detector americium in my garage, and somehow transported it to a foreign country and blew up a soccer stadium or religious gathering, it would be a crime, not an act of war, as I don’t work for the government, and they would have had no involvement whatsoever.
The US government would almost certainly apprehend me and extradite me to whatever country that was…as a common criminal.
If a CIA agent did the same thing as part of his official business, then yes, it would be an act of war (assuming he got caught and outed as a CIA agent).
Isn’t that pretty much the worst and best example you can give because pirates are a special case? Haven’t pirates been fair game for everyone for a very long time?