Lawyer Obama needs to bone up on the Geneva Convention, which neither the Taliban nor Al Qaeda signed. They believe that any such man-made law is blasphemy if it doesn’t spring from the Koran.

Likewise, the terrorists did not comply with the GC. They did not identify themselves as combatants and they targeted civilians, both violations of the GC which denies them its protection. Technically, they’re spies who can be shot. When the OSS landed its Jedburgh teams in civvies behind Nazi lines, the Nazis executed them. It was perfectly legal and we made no complaint.

Kazuo Sakamaki was the first prisoner of WWII, the captain of a midget sub swamped outside the mouth of Pearl Harbor, caught the morning after the attack. There was no talk of trying him in a domestic court nor kicking him loose if we couldn’t prove he attacked us. Maybe some smart lawyer would have made the case that he was sunbathing on the beach when racist American GIs rounded him up and falsely accused him. We held Sakamaki for years until the Japanese empire ceased their war against us, then released him.

By contrast, when some of the Doolittle Raiders were tried for war crimes, unlike our treatment of Sakamaki, and executed, we considered that an outrage. Obama is advocating the Hirohito approach rather than the Geneva Convention approach.

The Geneva Convention was written to moderate war, to round off its sharp edges, to outlaw its terroristic excesses. When you give terrorists, who deliberately violate the GC, more legal privileges than legal combatants who abide by the GC, you are turning the Geneva Convention on its head and perverting its intention.

We can see that springing prisoners from Gitmo to rejoin the jihad results in more deaths of innocent parties. Where in this concern for the rights of jihadis is any consideration for their victims, past and future?

Had we granted habeas corpus to legal combatants we would have had to kick most of our Japanese, German, and Italian prisoners free in WWII. After all, we did not have witnesses to present evidence against each one to prove they had shot at our troops. Perhaps we would have had to parachute a division of lawyers behind the beach head at Normandy to ensure the German defenders rights were properly observed.

We should hold the terrorists prisoner at Gitmo until their patron organizations cease their war against America. It is their misfortune that Islam declares perpetual war against the whole world in its insane war of religious imperialism. They should bear the burden and risk of their rejection of international law and their relentless bellicosity, not us, their targets.

You can not fight a war with police, lawyers, courts, and judges. Such an approach is doomed to fail as reactionary and defensive. It attempts to micromanage each attacker’s case. To win you must take the initiative, go on the offensive, take the war to the enemy with the military. You must handle your enemy captives as a group, just as we handled our German prisoners en masse in camps. We didn’t grant them the constitutional rights of a US citizen nor did we ever consider that the way to acquire such rights of an American citizen was to kill one.

Tantor on June 17, 2008 at 11:03 PM

blink: “Isn’t this out of the hands of the next President?”

When the Supreme Court ruled that slaves had no rights a white man was bound to respect, did that mean that slavery was out of the hands of Lincoln?

Tantor on June 17, 2008 at 11:24 PM