What with all the to-do over the law recently passed by Congress to deal with the treatment of captured enemy combatants and that pesky little thing called the Geneva Conventions there’s been a lot of discourse between the "f— ’em they’re terrorists, they don’t have or deserve rights like us" crowd and those who are a little frightened by the idea of giving the President the power to define what is cruel punishment and pretty much freaked out by the denial of habeas corpus the new law provides.  Based on how I wrote that last sentence you can probably guess that I’m part of the latter crowd, but before you think of me as some "lilly-livered I love the world and the world loves me" type let me explain my thinking.

First, I don’t understand how we can have a "War on Terror" and not consider terrorists prisoners of war.  People say that we can’t treat the terrorists as POWs because they aren’t traditional soldiers for a state funded armed force, rather they represent a nebulous, sectarian foe.  If you look at it that way then we can’t say we’re at war because you can’t declare war on a nebulous, sectarian foe.  Our leaders are being disingenuous, to put it kindly, and we need to hold their feet to the fire by asking two very simple questions: Are we at war or not?  If we’re at war then why can’t we treat everyone we capture as a POW?

Second, if we accept the designation of the terrorists as "enemy combatants" why do we need to create a new system to deal with them?  I remember clearly when the first President Bush initiated the "invasion" of Panama and we captured Manuel Noriega and then shipped him to the States and in the great American tradition we charged him with federal crimes, provided him with a lawyer and then put him away.  (BTW, he’s still in jail in Florida).  Noriega had been financed by the CIA (in fact Bush 1 had authorized some of the payments when he was head of the CIA) and it was only when he started misbehaving (harassing US troops in the Panama Canal zone and eventually killing a US Marine) and engaging in various activities like drug smuggling that the US took him down.  If we can do this with the head of a sovereign nation’s military why can’t we do it with a bunch of religious fanatics who killed or are trying to kill American citizens?  Charge them with federal crimes, try them, convict them and put them away.  Hell, we could even get the death penalty for them and legally kill them.

Perhaps we the people are willing to accept the government’s new system because we’re so consumed with fear and a desire for vengeance that we’ve forgotten our long tradition of justice.  Perhaps our political leaders are using our fear and lust for vengeance to serve their own purposes (stay in power, expand powers of the President).  Perhaps our leaders want the new system because they view the traditional system as more difficult to use to get the results they desire than their new system and they’re probably right, but we didn’t elect these guys to take the easy road, we elected them to take the right road.  Perhaps many of the members of Congress aren’t really serious about
this law and are counting on the Supreme Court to find it
unconstitutional, thus allowing them to make political hay but not
really give the President what he wants.

But I digress so let’s leave this with my original question: How can we have a war on terror and not consider captured terrorists prisoners of war?