Unprivileged

--The Burned Village (1942),
Alexander Deineka

If there is going to be change, real change,
it will have to work its way from the bottom up,
from the people themselves.
That’s how change happens
--Howard Zinn, historian

It's so easy not to try,
let the world go drifting by
--The Hobbit (animation)
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The Phony War on Terror (PWOT©) construction has created a miasma of legal contortions where before there was only clarity.

The blatant lies are the most grating: If the U.S. is at war with al-Qaeda and terrorism, then all imprisoned while engaged in such activities should be prisoners of war. Instead, they are what we choose to call them, and the sandwich board changes daily.

Now, they are Unprivileged Combatants (UC's) per International Humanitarian Law. An unlawful combatant or unprivileged combatant/belligerent is "a civilian who directly engages in armed conflict in violation of International Humanitarian Law (IHL) and may be detained or prosecuted under the domestic law of the detaining state for such action" (per ICRC defintion). UC's do not qualify for P.O.W. status.

Since UC's are under the legal jurisdiction of the domestic law of the detaining state and the U.S. is the detaining state, then terror suspects are subject to Federal law, which covers crimes like murder, kidnapping, hijacking and conspiracy.

Yet despite the unambiguity of the designation, the conservatives continue the bad fight to keep our laws and Constitution from working.

Senators Lieberman and Collins wrote last week that the decision to treat would-be crotch bomber Abdulmutallab as a common criminal "almost certainly prevented the military and the intelligence community from obtaining information that would have been critical to learning more about how our enemy operates and to preventing future attacks."

Predictably, Democrats Blanche Lincoln and Jim Webb, Republicans Lindsey Graham, John McCain and Susan Collins, and Independent Joe Lieberman are still arguing that "The attacks of 9/11 were acts of war, and those who planned and carried out those attacks are war criminals," and said so in a letter to Obama last week.

For a larger perspective: If al-Qaeda is such a threat, why would they send a 24-year-old toss-away with no worthwhile operational knowledge of their techniques to execute such a feat of non-derring-do? Anybody believing that the crotch bomber has additional information to impart has ridden shotgun with Jack Bauer one too many times. Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab is no Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (whom the Wall Street Journal still insists on featuring at his 2003-Ron Jeremy best.)

This contingent harangues that by deny these criminals the right to remain silent, the detained can somehow be forced to spill the beans, like in an episode of the t.v. series "24". But if they will not talk in a criminal case, why would they talk as UC's?

A WSJ editorial last week whined, "If the Administration is going to insist on treating the likes of KSM as ordinary criminal defendants, it would be clarifying if Congress voted on a bill laying down new limits to these laws (Congress and Terror Trials)." But why limit or constrict what works?

Congress cannot modify a legal construct such as the right to remain silent in a criminal case, or the right and dignity not to be tortured as a civilian non-privileged detainee. Why does the U.S. accept the concept of Presidential War Powers to address what is clearly a criminal threat evident by terror activities?

Everything that terrorists do is covered by U.S. code -- EVERYTHING. Terrorism is criminal activity, not warfare. The president cannot unilaterally and extra-legally declare someone to be an illegal enemy combatant.

Our Criminal Code and courts were not designed to protect spooks and spies. The laws of the land do not exist to protect intelligence services and their methods and sources: "Spies and terrorists are only protected by the laws of war if the power which holds them is in a state of armed conflict or war, and until they are found to be an unlawful combatant. They may be subject to civilian law or military tribunal for their acts."

The laws exist to defend the rights and dignity of all men -- even terror suspects. Taken pragmatically, we don't do it for them, but we do it for us.

While terrorism is not a war crime, the case could have been made that the attacks of 9-11 were Crimes Against Humanity, in which case its perpetrators should have been remanded to the World Court at The Hague. If we had critical thinkers in charge, they would have been able to discriminate the events of 9-11 from that terrorist activity involved in say perpetrating the takeover of the U.S. embassy in Tehran in 1979, which was an act of war. However, in neither case was the terrorism itself, war.

The government does not have my permission to torture or to hold suspects for long-term, open-ended imprisonment. That is NOT the American way. If it is, the Greatest Generation made a mistake in destroying the Nazi regime.