Once again, Obama has the choice of doing it the way "human rights advocates" suggest or the Bush way, and he's
chosen the correct course:
I'll give Obama credit; he's much more of a pragmatist than I realized. Preventative detention seems like a solid tool for use in the war on terror, and I am glad to see President Bush's methods in that struggle being validated by the new president.
The more important question is: why is a terrorist taken prisoner at all?
I recall a number of orders we operated under, a while back, that were worded as such: kill or capture.
Kill's actually easier. The only reason to capture one is the potential to extract info to find and kill the others, or at least disrupt and degrade their networks and operations.
In the concept Bush proposed, what was going on vis a vis terror is in fact "war" versus something else. In that framework, kill or capture makes sense only if you intend to exploit for your own purposes those whom you capture. By mixing the two, and deciding to have war crimes trials, or any trials at all, IMO he shot himself in the foot, conceptually. (Sure, war on terror is a nebulous concept to start with, but if the "war" method had been better adhered to, some of this later nonsense might have been avoided. Might.)
Those who keep trying to force feed this matter into a criminal only context ignore, time and again, that for forty years, treating terrorism discretely as a crime not only was ineffective, but it was In No Way a deterrent.
Note Architect's point: the change from internment to prison and trials
Didn't End the Activity
Architect makes another point: political change often helps reduce the tensions that spur terrorist activity, for a while at least. For NI that might have been sweetness and light all around, but not every political change that allegedly would slow that down is palatable:
Or do you want your wife wearing a Burkha?
The initial idea behind Bush's War on Terror was that terrorist organizations, and any nation who gave them shelter, support, and cover, were going to be up against the entire power of the US and its various allies. (See Lybia's 2003 thawing for an example of how that was effective in achieving other objectives.)
The decision to conflate, for the convenience of political momentum being there, War on Terror with the old problem of "What to do with this running political sore that is Iraq" was a departure from the original idea of discarding the profoundly ineffective "treat it only as a crime" concept and maintaining focus on that mission within the original scope.
That decision to expand the "war on terror" to Iraq rendered WoT virtually meaningless. I have a medal that says I fought in the War on Terror. Oh joy.
That loss of focus, for my money, continues to color and confuse the issue.
Separating any operations in Iraq from the general "War on Terror" may not have allowed the war to get approved in Congress, not gonna derail there. But doing so would not have changed the thorny issues raised at Gitmo, a loophole exploitation attempt that does not seem to have worked.
But keeping the scope limited might have made the problem more manageable. Might. It was still going to be a political problem to solve, since the media battlefield and the use of trials as political footballs is an old technique harnessed by terrorist organizations.
As I have suggested before, keeping the prisoners taken in Afghanistan in Afghanistan, in a detention facility, as bait for attempted rescue would have made more logistical and political sense. Part of the purpose of such bait is to lure, and kill, not capture, even more.
But nobody asked me.
DR
