Friday, June 15, 2007

The Gitmo Delusion

Jonathan Hafetz calls attention to a confusion of categories resulting from the nature of the war on terror, which calls into question the way in which we determine and deal with enemy combatants. Basically, it boils down to the difference between enemies and suspects:

...In World War II, for example, there was little question that captured German or Japanese soldiers were, in fact, enemies. At the same time, their detention was limited to the duration of a war that had a clear and definite end, and they were afforded the protections of the Geneva Conventions.

But neat divisions between detention and trial break down when applied to the administration's "war on terror," which has no identifiable enemy or battlefield. As a result, it is easy to mistakenly detain people based upon suspicion, innuendo, or mere association. At the same time, detention as an "enemy combatant" amounts to a potential life sentence, since the "war on terror," the administration says, may last generations...

Terrorism by definition presents an epistemological challenge that conventional warfare doesn't. The first hurdle is being sure we know who the enemy is. Not in the abstract, on the level of terrorist organizations that we can identify as threats. But in the concrete expression, on the level of individual operatives where, besides the most visible few, there remains a doubt.

A correlary effect of terrorism, therefore, is a form of justified paranoia. Doubt about who the actual enemy is leads to the perception of everyone as a potential threat. In aggravated cases of paranoia, of course, doubt gives way to a compensatory certainty, and everyone is perceived as an actual threat.

Now consider that the mere suspicion of being an enemy combatant routinely leads to secret detention and torture, and that any evidence obtained through that torture is permissible in the CSRT (the hearings that determine whether someone is an enemy combatant). Knowing what we know about the unreliability of tortured-induced self-incrimination, this means that the mere suspicion of being an enemy combatant will most likely result in actually being classified one.

It's a neat way to solve the problem of filling up our detention centers with people we call our enemies. It might even serve the useful function of providing enough "confirmed" terrorists to prevent a collective slide into full-scale, psychotic paranoia. But it does nothing to solve the problem actually presented by terrorism, that is, knowing for sure who our enemies are.

The problem with militarizing the response to terrorism is that war is not an effective tool for determining competing truth claims. The American legal system, on the other hand, whether criminal or military, is. Until the enemy combatant review procedures are brought into line with traditional American jurisprudence, they will continue to function as a placebo, when what's needed is real justice.

Posted by Judah in:  Global War On Terror   Human Rights   

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