Ralph Peters has a simple solution to the indefinite detention conundrum which keeps wet liberals like Marc Ambinder up all night sobbing into their pillows over the neglected “rights” of terrorists given quarter and taken alive.
Silly narcissistic people, like Ambinder, who make moral statements along with their fashion statements and for the same reasons, will never recognize the inevitable fruits of their eager intrusion into the issue. Bang! goes the gun in the hand of the US soldier or intelligence officer who now knows better than to take any prisoners who are going to serve as the focus of such a costly, idiotic, and self-lacerating domestic debate.
There can be little doubt that what Ralph Peters advocates will de facto be the never-expressed policy.
We made one great mistake regarding Guantanamo: No terrorist should have made it that far. All but a handful of those grotesquely romanticized prisoners should have been killed on the battlefield.
The few kept alive for their intelligence value should have been interrogated secretly, then executed.
Terrorists don’t have legal rights or human rights. By committing or abetting acts of terror against the innocent, they place themselves outside of humanity’s borders. They must be hunted as man-killing animals.
And, as a side benefit, dead terrorists don’t pose legal quandaries.
Jerry in Detroit
Under the Geneva Convention, terrorists and guerillas are unauthorized combatants. As such, they are entitled to court martial and summary execution. Ralph is right. Most of the detainees in Guantanamo never should have left the country they were captured in.
Hrothgar
Note that one can reverse the order of events and it works for me (summary execution folllowed by a court martial). The point of the Geneva Conventions was to formalize the rules of war for conventional military units backed by nation states. It deliberately excluded free-lance terrorists and that ilk from any of its protections, specifically so that the legal morass we are now in would not come to pass. Looks like they under-estimated the lawyers!
Kay B. Day
Gitmo was the Dem seizure of a national security crisis, with many “facts” fabricated (the placement of photos of Abu Ghraib with text/content about Gitmo) to suit the objectives of orgs like the Center for Constitutional Rights (as long as you’re a suspected terrorist, your rights are their concern).
No one mentioned Clinton’s rendition approach. No one mentioned the real reason for memos and paper trails–an effort to attempt to actually protect the rights of those detainees. And the CCR held the Blind Sheikh’s hand while their attorney smuggled his messages out to aid other terrorists.
If the whole neo-liberal political posturing doesn’t make you sick, nothing will.
best, KayDay
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