Posted on 06/25/2007 9:46:45 PM PDT by gpapa
Proposals to treat detainees as criminal defendants make a mockery of international humanitarian law.
Was it wishful thinking? On Thursday the Associated Press reported that, according to sources it did not name, "the Bush administration is nearing a decision to close the Guantanamo Bay detainee facility and move the terror suspects there to military prisons elsewhere." The White House quickly denied the rumor, and, for good measure, on Friday the Pentagon announced that Guantanamo had admitted its first new detainee in months: Haroon al-Afghani, a commander from the al Qaeda-affiliated terror group Hezb-i-Islami.
(Excerpt) Read more at opinionjournal.com ...
Its a mistake to think you can adjudicate war. If war can be managed by attorneys with brief cases, with suits and ties, serving subpoenas and fashioning brilliant arguments before judges behind mahogany benches, you are not yet at war.
War is by its very nature an extra-legal enterprise, it is the state of affairs that exists when lawyers and policemen and judges are no longer able to manage a confrontation. At that point, the men in suits take a recess, and the men with guns go in to kill the men who couldn’t be reasoned with, them and anyone standing near them, you wipe out their leadership and everything of value that can be used to keep them alive, you wipe out whole towns if necessary, whole armies, and when you have completely re-drawn the map and created a new status quo to replace the old toxic one, only then do you let the men in suits with the briefcases resume control.
War is the parenthesis that occupies the space between the failure of the old status quo and the birth of the new one. When rule-of-law resumes, when a new circumstance has emerged that permits the resumption of rule-of-law, the war is over.
If they cut these animals loose they ought to just drop them off in Dick Durbin’s zip code.
Perfectly stated, every word. Thank you for pointing out what the journalists, most of our political officials, the State Dept, too much of the military, and virtually all of the academics cannot seem to grasp: war is extra-legal by it’s very nature.
With your permission, this one is going on the office door.
Well written, well said, succinct, to the point, and true. I salute your turn of phrase.
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