Quote:
Originally posted by Bad_Rich_Chic
OK, so we catch a terrorist plotting to bomb something or other. He is transported to the US and ... given a public trial, his lawyers have access to the intelligence information used to identify and catch him (or it can't be introduced), and if it isn't proved beyond a reasonable doubt that he did it, he is immediately released? During a time of war?
If by "treatment of prisoners" you just mean "once they are in custody and neutralized as an ongoing or future danger, don't torture them, give the red cross access, etc.," that's quite different from what I thought you meant. I could be persuaded to agree with this.
FWIW, IRA terrorists were not prosecuted as a mere "band of criminals" - there was a series of special anti-terrorism laws in the UK which treated them very differently than normal criminals, though they were not deemed enemy combatants in a war. The UK did this for a lot of reasons - one was probably to avoid effectively declaring war on one of its own provinces (and potentially on countries permitting support of the IRA), and another was that they wanted to handle the prosecution of citizens within their own justice system rather than treating them as they would a captured Hun in 1943 (which might have had the effect of legitimizing separatist claims to a national identity separate from the UK). So the UK basically tried to use an orange juicer on an apple (sorry). It is a problem that a number of european courts reviewing alleged human rights violations discussed - the UK basically splintered its justice system trying to expand it to deal with these guys, when they should have simply acknowledged them as self-proclaimed enemy combatants and applied international standards of war. When they tried to expand domestic criminal justice as necessary to handle terrorist acts, they (arguably) violated international norms for criminal prosecution. I think the IRA example illustrates exactly why criminal prosecution is inappropriate for terrorist acts.
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Interestingly, I run the IRA analysis the other way: the debacle encountered by the British with the IRA illustrates perfectly why we don't want to have a pseudo-criminal seperate system for handling terrorists. The British did exactly what we are doing: they not only created a series of laws imposing additional penalties for terrorist activities (which I have no problem with), but they also created a special procedural system, that (not coincidentally) did not include many of the protections given criminals in common law countries.
Here's the kicker: it was the (mis)treatment of these prisoners by the British that drove up the popularity of the IRA in Northern Ireland, the Republic and ultimately the US.
The British let their short term fear of allowing a terrorist to go free to undermine their long term safety by convincing Irish Catholics that their worst fears were true, that they were second class citizens subject to a different (and harsher) set of rules. Had the British played it straight from the begining, the Catholic masses would have had less reason to move from their initial opinion of the IRA as hooligans to the IRA as freedom fighters.
Tell me that Gitmo isn't being used right this very second to convince some impressionable Muslim youth that America hates him because he loves Allah.
