NO! it does not require surrender it requires investigation.
Effectively investigation, at the level that would be required for real criminal cases, does require surrender. You can't possibly investigate all captured enemy at the level that would normally be required to get a conviction in an American court. Are you going to call witnesses from Afghanistan. Are you going to recall the platoon that captured the detainee, pulling them away from combat for weeks of pre-trial investigation and months for the trial? Are you going to routinely be able to collect high quality forensic evidence from a battlefield (perhaps even a still active one).
Requiring enemy combatants to be treated as criminals means you are going to have to let most of them go. If all captured enemy are let go, the soldiers will find excuses not to capture them. They don't want to be killed by the same guy that they captured last week. So maybe surrender isn't required, instead of surrender you just get brutal and nasty, and take no prisoners.
But if you are going to apply our normal standards and take prisoners, but then you let them go because you can't prove them guilty beyond all reasonable doubt in a jury trial, then you basically are surrendering. At least surrendering any chance of winning.
Also treating enemy combatants as criminals, if all they did was attack American forces, not murder civilians or generally commit crimes, actually violates their rights under treaties and conventions that the US is a signatory to. They are supposed to be held until the war is over, and then released. Not sentenced to some term in jail and then treated as a regular criminal, unless they have committed some specific crime.
generally, when mistakess are made i expect them to be admitted and corrected so as to avoid making the same mistake twice. dont u?
You can't avoid making this same mistake twice, and any serious effort to do so, basically insures that you lose the wars you fight.
You can reduce the number of mistakes, which is what we have been trying to do for quite some time. |
