Smart bombs
I’m no legal scholar. I don’t even play one on TV. But as analysts wade into the deep thickets of constitutional jurisprudence as it relates to habeas corpus, I can’t get past the fact that the Bush administration’s argument hinges on the belief that we swooped into Afghanistan and unerringly collected up terrorists.
And it wasn’t just us. Fawzi Al-Odah was captured by Pakistani bounty hunters and turned over to American troops. Yeah, it’s hard to imagine bounty hunters getting it wrong what with all that cash dangled in front of them. Now, it’s possible that hunters merely grabbed people that we identified as terrorists, but am I the only one who has grown wary of our intelligence services? Not to be picky, but where is Osama bin Laden? Where are Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction?
It seems odd that an administration that has been forced to reconstruct U.S. intelligence services is dead certain that all of the detainees at Guantanamo are indeed “enemy combatants.” Isn’t it possible that a few of them were just in the wrong place at the wrong time? If so, shouldn’t they be given access to legal recourse?
If their guilt is a slam dunk, they won’t be released.
Aiding the enemy. One of the tragic consequences of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal is that a lot of the people who were imprisoned had done nothing wrong in the first place. Troops were ordered to conduct sweeps of neighborhoods and grab men of fighting age, without really knowing whether they were the enemy. The purpose was to gather intelligence, because the military wasn’t sure who the insurgents were.
Well, that didn’t go so well. So while many of the prisoners weren’t our enemies before, they were after. And the news spread rapidly about how they were treated by Americans. It sure made life easier for anti-American recruiters.
Nevertheless, supporters of limitless detentions fail to understand the ramifications of our heavy-handed tactics. In his dissent in the Guantanamo case, Associate Justice Antonin Scalia wrote: “It (legal access) will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed.”
Troops die every day as a consequence of our government’s mistakes. Seems there ought to be a lesson in that.
No Armistice Day. Sorry, but I’m not buying the prisoner-of-war argument in the Guantanamo case. No, we didn’t grant foreign prisoners access to U.S. courts in previous wars, but we did release them once those wars were over. How will we know when the war on terror is finished?