re: #189 ozbloke

Sorry wrenchwench if I was not clear.

I have been told charges have been laid against Manning, but I wasn’t only talking about Manning or people within the US military.

It seems to me since the beginning of the war on terror the USA has adopted a policy of holding some people and not getting them a speedy trial.

I was asking whether it began with the war on terror.

War is different from crime. In war, you take prisoners, and you hold them, not because it is illegal for them to wage war on you, but because if you let them go they’ll go wage more war on you.

Duh.

You hold them until the war is over, so that letting them go doesn’t mean they’ll go back to fighting you.

Some of our prisoners are basically POW’s. We took them in combat, under circumstances where they were bearing arms against us openly, as part of an insurgency.

Others are hard to categorize. If they were pretending to be civilians, and were in the embattled country [Iraq, Afghanistan] then they themselves have broken the law of war. We would be within our rights to put them before a firing squad after a military trial to check that we have our facts straight.

If they were pretending to be civilians, and not in the battle zone, e.g. placing a bomb in Times Square, then the question arises, are they illegal combatants, fighting as soldiers in a cause but fighting by means that are forbidden to warriors, or are they just plain criminals and not part of the war at all?

In the first case, again we would be within our rights to put them before a firing squad after a military trial to check the facts. In the second case—-maybe they’re insane? Maybe only in their own mind they’re working for al Qaeda?

We are loath to execute all these guys, even if going strictly by the book they have it coming. So we just hold them, extending to them the courtesy and the gift of no firing squad.

It is a generous and merciful treatment and they have little grounds for complaint. So many of the ones we did release have indeed gone back to fighting us, after all. And those were the ones judged least likely to take up arms again.