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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TimF who wrote (124147)	7/8/2005 9:05:08 PM
From: Ilaine	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793914

It would help if we defined the concepts that we are discussing. If you imagine that everybody in Gitmo is a member of Al Qaeda who was picked up in the very act of firing a gun at American forces, knowing fully and exactly what he was doing, that's one thing. If you imagine that some of the people in Gitmo were possibly innocent bystanders who got swooped up in a wide net, or maybe complete innocents who were turned in by malicious neighbors who had a vendetta, that's something else entirely. And in between, due to the complexities of existence, are numerous individuals who are closer to one or to the other or something else yet again. In contrast, in war time, the combatants wear uniforms, and give name, rank, and serial number, and by international treaty, if captured are held in relatively humane condition until the war is over. Something else entirely. In contrast, in our own country, people who commit crimes are subject to multiple layers of law, and that's something else again. I don't find it interesting, much less useful, to try to short circuit the process of dealing with individual cases by lumping large indigestible masses of people together. Especially when the unspoken agenda is bashing people who don't happen to agree with you -- not that I am saying that's your agenda. The simple, narrow point that I was trying to make to Kholt is that my argument in favor of due process doesn't really depend on how you define the situation, whether you call the captives "criminals," nor "enemy combatants," nor "terrorists," nor "pirates." The process of deciding who they are and what to do with them requires certain legal safeguards. Those legal safeguards are called "due process." The concept of "due process" applies to every legal process. It's inherent in our legal system that our government must operate according to the rule of law, not ad hoc, not at whim, not willy-nilly. We don't allow our soldiers to engage in the old time practices of rape, pillage, plunder, burning villages, poisoning wells, holding prisoners for ransom, and many other things. It's against the military code. And we don't allow them to commit torture, either.