Guantanamo Bay
The Supreme Court is going to take up another case about the indefinite detainments at Guantanamo Bay. The readers of this sight have on numerous occasions harped about how this is a violation of their rights (its not) and a violation of the Geneva Conventions (its not). Its easy to criticize a solution to a problem when you are not faced with dealing with that problem.
Lets say you have captured a group of non-citizens on foreign soil committed to doing harm to your citizens. Lets further say no state exists to claim responsibility for those individuals. Releasing them will most certainly lead to the outcome that a portion of them will rejoin groups intent on harming your citizens. Discriminating between those that would do harm and those that will not is virtually impossible. How would you manage this problem?
Bear in mind that if you find acceptable the outcome that some civilian death might occur so that theses individuals are treated fairly you weaken arguments for constraining other rights for the sake of reducing civilian death. The most obvious being gun control.
December 5th, 2007 at 1:48 pm
Hold a speedy and fair military trial that is open to public scrutiny, just like all our other court systems. This isn’t hard.
December 5th, 2007 at 2:01 pm
Gosh what does fair mean in this case. Making it public might be problematic from an intelligence perspective.
What kind of evidence would you demand in order to justify keeping these combatants detained. Would the standards of evidence be as high as they are for citizens. The higher you set the criteria the more combatant will be released that will try and harm citizens.
Your response reflects how you have never actually had to think about this problem. Sure you have a strong opinion that the state should not detain non-citizens but you have never reflected on the problem that this solution attempts to solve.
December 5th, 2007 at 2:36 pm
I have; you just underestimate my level of idealism on this. Even civilian courtrooms don’t allow cameras into the courtroom; make th stenographer’s record of teh trial open to the public, black out anything that’s classified, have teh appropriate oversight committees made of people who do have clerance overseeing the trials to make sure they’re being run fairly. Use the same standards of reasonable doubt or whatever that are usually used in military courts. If we don’t have evidence against someone that stands up to those standards, let them go.
You make the point that the higher your standards of evidence are, the more likely you are to let a true enemy combatant go. Obviously this is true, but what’s your solution? Hold anyone at all in secret forever on hearsay evidence from anonymous sources? The exact same argument is t rue in civilian courts- having a high standard of reasonable doubt means that more murderists will go unconvicted. The Founding Father sthought that was ok, and so do I.
December 6th, 2007 at 1:28 am
You ask
I’m going to take the hard argument and say yes. Clearly you can’t treat citizens this way. I would obviously argue against treating non-citizens with a country that will claim responsibility for them in this way. But what we have here is a group of non-citizens with no nation to claim them. Additionally, they have been caught with a groups that has successfully killed US citizens. Why not detain them indefinitely provided you treat them well? Or at least you could detain them until you are certain they will cause the US any more harm.
I would favor a military tribunal with congressional oversight. However the burden of proof would certainly be placed on the detainee and I would set the bar rather high. I would want to err on the side of protecting US citizens then non-citizens without a nation associated with terrorist organizations. Sending a message to non-citizens that commitment to a virulent organization attempting to harm US citizens may result in indefinite detainment seems wise to me. If one knows that do harm against the US could lead to lifetime in jail they may be incline to reconsider.
December 6th, 2007 at 12:39 pm
“a violation of the Geneva Conventions (its not)”
I’m curious Steve, have you personally read all of the Geneva conventions in their entirety or are you relying on experts to interpret them for you?
December 6th, 2007 at 1:16 pm
Actually I’m mostly relying on pundits.
Given that you failed to cite the passage that Geneva extends rights to individuals not part of any army I’m going to assume that my pundits were correct. Good thing I trusted them and I didn’t even have to waste time looking it up.
From now on I don’t even need pundits for this issue. I know that the Geneva Conventions does not extend to terrorists thanks to your failure in proving me otherwise.
December 6th, 2007 at 3:30 pm
If I start calling Global Warming scientists ‘Pundits’ instead of ‘Experts’, will you start trusting their analysis?
December 6th, 2007 at 10:42 pm
It’s interesting that you have such complete confidence in a combination of Dan and pundits. I am flattered, really, that you have so much faith in me, but I don’t think it is entirely warranted.
Suppose I said the following: the Geneva conventions proscribe that captives fall into one of two categories: ‘noncombatants’, who are entitled to one set of protections, and ‘combatants’, who are entitled to a different set of protections. The whole idea of an ‘unlawful combatant’ is not contained in the text of the Geneva conventions and is at best an ineffective attempt at finding a loophole. Arguing that no country will take them and they are therefore not combatants merely places them, by default, in the category of ‘noncombatants’ (yes, this is a tautology, but denying it seems to be the legal basis of the defense of current prisoner treatment), and the protections afforded noncombatant captives under the Geneva conventions are even stricter than the protections afforded combatant captives.
Would you then go read them to find the passage that demonstrates I am wrong? If so I am all in favor of it, because I find it much more satisfying to argue with individuals who are actually informed enough construct their own refutations rather than just regurgitating tired sound bites they heard from pundits.
December 10th, 2007 at 2:30 pm
Given that i view experts as a highly refined pundit its quite possible my view on things would change provided that the pundit/expert was one I trusted.