If you have to come up with nonsense like this to help you sleep at night, maybe you should reassess what you’re doing.
For certain values of “battlefield”…
Drones can’t fundamentally do anything human soldiers can’t. They’re no more problematic than human soldiers, and cost us less in both money and blood. The only reason Obama has been using them more than other presidents is just that the technology matured during his tenure-- If McCain or Romney had won, they’d be using them too, and the next President will continue using them, regardless of party.
They can fly thousands of sorties without the danger of a single American casualty. They do not raise the level of concern among Americans that having real live people flying bombing raids does. They do, in fact, change the calculus of things.
And they are so high tech!
What’s not to like?
Well, there is the occasional wedding party that gets hit. Oops.
Does anybody know how long it’s been since anyone’s been put into Gitmo? I’m wondering whether it’s possible the problem is still growing.
I think the last person sent to Guantanamo was circa 2006. The population peaked near 800 detainees, and now it is down to just over 100.
Of those, about half have been recommended for trial, a couple dozen recommended for indefinite detention under the law of war, and a declining number are cleared to transfer to other countries.
Specifically, they make it much easier to conduct a war without having to acknowledge that what you are doing is, in fact, conducting a war by putting your soldiers at risk or bombing a locale in front of a camera crew. It is the very essence of sanitized warfare that makes it seem so civilized to the viewers watching it all in twenty second segments on CNN. To the people living on this “battlefield”, however, the reality is somewhat different, insofar as an attack can come from an open sky with no warning, and there is often little or no accountability, or indeed, someone in the chain of command who is clearly responsible for a particular attack.
The previous administration wanted boots on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan because it had an agenda of not only (or even especially) hunting insurgents and terrorists but effecting regime change, which isn’t something you can do by bombing alone. It is true that the next administration–whomever it is–will doubtless continue with their use, which is an unfortunate but perhaps inevitable precedent to set. I just hope the mentality does not extend to orbital strike weapons and the militarization of orbital space with all that entails.
Stranger
You have to seriously wonder how much of a threat these guys could be. Even of every one of them was released and immediately joined a terrorist organization, how much potential danger would that add to the existing terrorist threat? The lowest estimates are that ISIS alone has over ten thousand active members (and many estimates say the real membership is much larger). And the Guantanamo detainees have all been out of circulation for ten years or more.
I don’t understand this. What “laws of war” allow indefinite detention of enemy combatants? I thought that a major reason we got into the whole Gitmo mess was that existing laws of war didn’t anticipate the nature of the combatants and the “enemy”, which was not a nation-state.
Well the alternative is to bomb the fuck out of the same people. Which is the position of the current President. Not sure why you think that’s morally superior to Gitmo. If it were me, I’d rather have soccer balls raining down on me.
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=18981780&postcount=60
The word “indefinitely” can be used in a couple of senses. One is in the sense of permanently, which is clearly not allowed. Another in the sense of “the number of years cannot be specified in advance,” which is the government’s position – that they can be locked up until the war is over, but who knows how long that will be.
I agree, there are a whole lot of reasons why we got into the Guantanamo mess; the whole torture debacle is chief among them. But even if Guantanamo were never created, the U.S. still would have faced a very vexing question: if the armed forces capture someone on the battlefield who is not entitled to POW protections (let’s say an Al Qaeda or Taliban sort of guy), what should we have done with them?
Traditionally, the idea of directing soldiers in a war zone to follow the same procedures expected of law enforcement to gather evidence, collect testimony, and protect witnesses has been seen as burdensome, impractical, and even dangerous. Soldiers get shot at a lot more than police. With that in mind, the idea of transporting battlefield captures to the United States for prosecution because an extremist footsoldier was trying to kill Americans doesn’t seem like a practical idea as a blanket policy – for major terrorists and facilitators, it is a different story of course.
Or, we could hand bad guys over to the governments of where they came from or where they were captured – which has been done quite a lot. Almost certainly the best course of action, with the caveats that sometimes the bad guys break free, are released for no reason, or get tortured and we’re accused of rendition.
Or we could just count on killing them, an action whose legality could range from perfectly acceptable (if there is no chance to capture them and an attack doesn’t risk civilian lives) to a grave war crime (if we kill them using disproportionate amounts of force).
Now, the number of cases where we would be holding onto some detainee with no claim to POW status and have a hard time making a criminal case against the guy would most likely be fewer than we are dealing with today, had things been handled better and Guantanamo never created. But there would probably still be some kind of catch 22 for some number of detainees no matter what policies were implemented, IMHO.
In what sense is “bombing the fuck out of people” an alternative to locking them up and throwing away the key, exactly?
In a sane world, we would do the following:
- Transfer all prisoners to FCI Fort Dix.
- Immediately bring criminal charges for any detainee for whom we have probable cause to bring such charges, if any.
- Immediately parole the rest into the United States.
- Grant asylum or special immigration status to any detainee who cannot return home within 30 days for fear of persecution or torture.
- Suck it up and face the consequences because this is the land of the free not the land of torture and indefinite detention, and because we brought this on ourselves.
In the real world:
- Continue to release anyone who another country will take.
- Continue to pressure Congress to move inmates to the US, including shaming them over the high fiscal price of continuing to operate Gitmo as a detention camp.
- Pursue charges against officials whose torture exceeded even that disclosed to Congress and the DOJ when the immunity laws were written.
- Do everything we can to ensure that Donald Rumsfeld and all the decision-makers on down are remembered as the war criminals they are. Spit on their graves when they die.
I should add…
I agree with this. In 21st century warfare, there are genuine dilemmas posed by the capture of potential enemy combatants on the battlefield.
In my view, the original sins of Gitmo (overly arbitrary capture including detention based on third-hand say-so of paid and dubious informants, torture, cruel and unusual conditions of confinement, inadequate due process for the review tribunals) prevent us from now treating those detainees as if they had been captured by legitimate American forces on a battlefield somewhere.
For ordinary detainees–that is, those who are captured by American forces on the battlefield, who are not tortured, and who are given the kind if minimal due process those captured on the battlefield properly receive–the real dilemma is how long they can be kept in an era in which we have indefinite and nebulous declarations of war. In my view, that dilemma is as much about unlimited AUMFs as it is about detention policy. One of the downsides of passing a statute like the September 2001 AUMF is that it will mean the long-term detention of hundreds of people who never receive rigorous due process. But that’s no more objectionable than fighting stupid wars, in my mind. It’s a moral and policy problem, but on an entirely different dimension from what to do with guys like Mohamedou Slahi.
Sorry, in the real world Congress cannot be motivated by shame because it has none.
What every happened to the “just one” argument i hear all the time.
If one innocent, just one, is killed by a former occupant of Gitmo is one too many so we should stop the release program.
Are you saying that we should put everyone in your neighborhood in prison, because if one, just one commits a crime after you are all released…oh, fuck it all. Your argument is too stupid to even mock.
If just one innocent person is being held in Guantanamo, it’s one too many.
What about it? If you are endorsing it, can you make your case? If you’re mocking it, then… whatever.