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When allegations of prisoner abuse at Guantanamo were made, the media portrayed it as systematic abuse directed from above. Now that allegations are being made that prisoner abuse is worse under President Obama, it is being portrayed as NOT being systematic abuse directed from above and is, in fact, being used to prove that Guantanamo should be closed even faster.
I am quite sure that prisoners are abused at Guantanamo. I'm also quite sure that most of them are bad people who pose a threat to the US (and not just because they were driven to that by the evil of the US). Some are probably innocent. I am also sure that members of Al Qaeda allege abuse as a tactic to garner sympathy and take advantage of our cultural abhorrence of torture. They are taught to use our own legal protections against us. And we can't stop them without destroying that system. I also suspect that these same Al Qaeda prisoners know that under President Obama, they are likely to get a more sympathetic ear for their allegations. So even if there is an increase in abuse, it will be hard to know how much of it is real and how much of it is a tactic.
A part of me kind of hopes that some of these guys are transferred to maximum security prisons in the US. They will most likely find that US prisons (much to our shame) are far worse than Guantanamo.
Technorati: War on Terror
Thursday, February 26, 2009
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4 comments:
I cant understand the "not in my prison" attitude from US politicans of all stripes. Like the only thing that Brownback and Sebelius seem to agree on is that their maximum security military brig designed and paid for by the US military to house the worst that the military can find is somehow inadequate to hold enemy combatants. Why?
As for our legal system, the one that convicted the plotters of the first attempt to destroy the wtc, ted kazinsky, and the oklahoma city bomber... I have faith.
I trust out legal system but it is not intended to prosecute people captured on battlefields in other countries by soldiers who are not following police procedures. Soldiers are trained to fight wars, not gather evidence. I suspect that it would very difficult to make a case that would satisfy a civilian criminal court using evidence collected by soldiers (assuming they even "collected evidence" as that's not what they normally do).
I have to admit, that is a really good point. But fighting wars does include taking prisoners of war. We did declare war on terrorists in Afghanistan and we did capture a bunch of people there. Its never been fully clear why the Geneva convention doesn't apply:
http://www.unhchr.ch/html/menu3/b/91.htm
Specifically:
"Article 118
Prisoners of war shall be released and repatriated without delay after the cessation of active hostilities.
In the absence of stipulations to the above effect in any agreement concluded between the Parties to the conflict with a view to the cessation of hostilities, or failing any such agreement, each of the Detaining Powers shall itself establish and execute without delay a plan of repatriation in conformity with the principle laid down in the foregoing paragraph."
Supposedly the problem is with several dozen people who are clearly terrorists, clearly in the armed forces of an enemy Power (as defined in the convention) it does not matter that this Power is neither a signatory or a state. As the Detaining Power all we have to do is:
a) Define what the scope of the hostilities are
b) Define when cessation conditions would have to be achieve in order to activate that obligation
c) Design conceptual plans of repatriation. Like all conceptual plans it identifies the components, configurations, and locations required to make the repriation projet operate as well as doing some analysis of the rough tolerances of the plan and a costing estimate
d) Send the concepts out to state powers and private actors to see if the international community can put together an acceptable offer that the detaining power believes will work
e) Select the best concept and the group of nations, contractors, and NGOs who can best execute that concept.
f) Have the lead entity do the detailed design
e) Execute the repatriation of the prisoners.
Simple.
Al Qaeda is not a High Contracting Party and neither is the Taliban. I don't know about Iran but none of them are abiding by the Convention, so it does not apply to them. The Convention only applies to relations between High Contracting Parties.
According to Article 4, the terrorists we have captured are not Prisoners of War. We have actually been treating them as Prisoners of War in most ways but I believe they would be categorized as spies (hiding among civilians, attacking civilians, committing atrocities, etc...) and could be legally executed on the battlefield. Maybe if we'd done that, we wouldn't have this dilemma.
The only people in Iraq or Afghanistan who would count would be local civilians who spontaneously took up arms to fight us and abided by the rules of war while doing so... Very few have done that. Many are foreign and/or members of terrorist networks who commit war crimes and/or have been supported and encouraged by Iran.
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