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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated

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To: cnyndwllr who wrote (121552)	6/22/2005 5:58:38 PM
From: Lane3	Read Replies (1) of 793755

The war on terror, Bin Laden notwithstanding, is not a "WAR." ...The only remaining applicable rationale for imprisoning people is imprisonment for criminal activities. Wow, does that take me back, all the way to 9/11. I remember trying to sort through this back then through endless hours of discussion with some smart and thoughtful people on a diverse thread, which has since expired. It was wonderfully helpful to the clarification of my thoughts. I understand your aversion to a war paradigm and I agree that the reason stated, the one you responded to, is not an adequate basis for that. But I came down on the war side and I remain there because it's the better of the two alternatives. (And because the President was framing it that way without bothering to check in with me. <g>) What we have here really isn't fish or fowl. I remember the best parallel we came up with at the time was the Barbary Pirates. Spent a lot of time studying them and this mixed scenario we're in. I agree with you that there are problems with the war paradigm, but surely you can see that the criminal justice one is even less apt. If someone's shooting at us in Afghanistan, we have to put him away for the duration or he will just go back and shoot at us again. That's a war-type scenario. We can hardly read him his rights and have a trial with the testimony of witnesses and sentence him to x number of years for attempted murder or whatever. We would never convict anyone and the overhead would be enormous. It would be foolish make work and it just makes no sense. Surely you're not advocating that, are you? What I've been going on about this afternoon has been that we (the administration) haven't defined this thing well. Given that it's neither purely fish or fowl, we need clarity on what it is. And maybe we need a different word for it than war. But even less apt than calling it a war is framing it as criminal activity.

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