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| GITMO FOR DUMMIES |
| Thursday, June 23, 2005 |
| It should be a major concern to all Americans that most of the people in charge of making policy for the United States don't seem to understand the difference between an American charged with a crime and an enemy combatant plucked off a battlefield and put in a prison camp.
I cringe when I hear presumably educated people who have risen to the ranks of a member of Congress insist that the detainees at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp deserve to lawyer up, see a judge and get their day in court, as if they were American citizens charged with a crime.
I am therefore indebted to one William Barr, a former U.S. Attorney General for the first President Bush, who eloquently confirmed my position on the Gitmo prisoners of war in an interview with Brit Hume on Fox News Monday night. I was beginning to think it was possible that my views - contradicted by some many others - just might be wrong. Not anymore.
Mr. Barr testified on the issue last week, trying to set members of Congress straight. He has not been completely successful, and it's a mystery as to why. It's almost as if some people refuse to accept the indisputable facts for - I don't know - political reasons perhaps?
First, Barr corrected the misconception that the Supreme Court has ruled that the detainees deserve their day in court. Barr explained that the court only found that Habeas Corpus does place a burden on the administration to explain why it is holding the detainees. Barr further explained, "All that would be required is showing that this is a foreign person who has no connection with the United States, and I'm holding him because it's our judgment that we encountered him on the battlefield and he's an enemy combatant."
Barr continued, "What's going on with a lot of the critics is they are fundamentally confusing the context of our own domestic law enforcement versus fighting a war against an armed foreign enemy. We wrote a constitution not for the world, but for the people, the American people, and we made the decision when we set forth in the constitution that when the government, enforcing our own domestic laws against the people, we're going to put checks on the executive and we're going to insist that they get it absolutely perfect, no mistakes - it's better to let guilty people go free than to make a mistake - and so there are all these hurdles that have to be jumped over when we're disciplining a member of our own body politic. But when a foreign enemy comes and attacks the people, there's no neutrality, and what the constitution is worried about there is winning the war and the effectiveness of the government."
Barr is also adamant that the prisoners should not enjoy the privileges of the Geneva Convention. "The whole purpose of the Geneva Convention was to offer privileges to countries, the soldiers of countries that honored certain obligations, and the main one being protecting civilians by not mixing in with them and differentiating yourself with civilians" in order to minimize civilian casualties. He scoffed at the idea that "we would take terrorists, the very antithesis of people who deserve the privileges, and say 'well, yeah, you can go out and slaughter civilians and hide amongst them and we're going to treat you as if you are honorable combatants'"
Barr also stressed that the prisoners are not being held as alleged criminals. He said, "That is not punishment. It's detention. It's always been the case that in war, you are trying to destroy the enemy - destroy them, by either killing them, or in lieu of killing them, capturing them and taking them away from the battlefield and holding them until you can impose your will on the enemy. We've done that for 235 years."
Barr reminded the audience that, during World War II, 400-thousand Germans and Italians were kept as prisoners of war in the United States. They didn't have access to our courts.
I'm amazed at the people who don't understand the simple truth that Barr speaks. In an interview on Meet The Press, Sen. John McCain admonished the Bush administration to bring the detainees to trial. McCain scolded, "Even Adolf Eichmann got a trial." That's true, but it was 15 years after the war was over. Eichmann was hunted down, captured, and tried as a war criminal. Most of the prisoners of war were simply released.
Al Qaeda formally declared war on the United States in 1996. We were late to join the battle, but finally did so after one of their attacks killed more than 3,000 Americans on American soil on Sept. 11, 2001. When that war is over - when al Qaeda hostilities against the U.S. cease, and there is no longer a cause for which the Gitmo detainees will fight, then we can set them free. Until then, it would be self-destructive to do so, and nonsensical to give them a trial. Ralph Bristol |
posted by Jack Mercer @ 6/23/2005 03:07:00 PM   |
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Name: Jack Mercer
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