Enemy Combatants

The term is thrown about these days with remarkable vagueness. Its real meaning has been lost, to be replaced by a phantasmic miasma of fear and doubt. I have had a very difficult time understanding the fanatical desire to continue to hold those found innocent, Haynes' "no acquittals" comment, use of the term No Longer Enemy Combatants (NLEC), etc. This should be very easy to summarize: we made a mistake in arresting, detaining, "interrogating", and accusing the particular person in the first place. Why is this so difficult? Then, I found this: Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which states: "Individual or mass forcible transfers, as well as deportations of protected persons from occupied territory to the territory of the Occupying Power or to that of any other country, occupied or not, are prohibited, regardless of their motive." As contrasted with combatant POWs, who can be transferred out of country, it is a war crime on its face for non-combatants to be shipped like this. Because of the underlying purposes of torture, abuse, murder and depravity that in general accompany shipments of non-combatants, and because of the ease with which evidence of later crimes is then destroyed, this is a war crime that is complete on the shipment, without the hurdle of proving abuse and torture. That's why the label has been fought over so jealously IMO, and why no finding that someone was not an enemy combatant was allowed (new tribunals were convened in those few instances) and why the preferred term for the "mistakes" was "no longer an enemy combatant." They needed to preserve the claim that these persons who were bought and sold in human trafficking transactions separate from any battlefield and severed from any evidence of status, were "combatants" when they were shipped, or the war crime is pretty indisputable. Ah, now we see the problem: if the person was, in fact, NOT a combatant when transferred to Guantanamo, then that forcible transportation constitutes a war crime. If the detainee is found innocent of all charges - obviously then, not a combatant at any time - this presents a huge problem for the government. Hence Haynes' comment: "I said to (Haynes) that if we come up short and there are some acquittals in our cases, it will at least validate the process." "At which point, his eyes got wide and he said, 'Wait a minute, we can't have acquittals. If we've been holding these guys for so long, how can we explain letting them get off? . . . We've got to have convictions.'" If there was ever better evidence of the flimsy legal basis for the rendition program, this seems to be it. This also explains why the government has fought so hard to deny trials to those detained: if they are never found innocent, then the problem never materializes. We know - as does the government - that it is a virtual certainty that at least some of those detained are, in fact, innocent. People like Haynes and John Yoo thought, in their infinite arrogance, that their "plan" to avoid the possibility of having to answer for their actions was air-tight. We are beginning to see otherwise. The Geneva Convention uses the words it does for very specific reasons: "Individual or mass forcible transfers, as well as deportations of protected persons from occupied territory to the territory of the Occupying Power or to that of any other country, occupied or not, are prohibited, regardless of their motive." The "why" of this seems fairly obvious. It seems that the people that wrote the document were not interested in listening to the offending party explain their "motive", since "forcible transfers" are obviously a means of covering up wrong-doing... and doing wrong we have been. By way of this article, and this one, we learn that our "interrogation" techniques have been taken from Chinese interrogation documents: The military trainers who came to Guantánamo Bay in December 2002 based an entire interrogation class on a chart showing the effects of “coercive management techniques” for possible use on prisoners, including “sleep deprivation,” “prolonged constraint,” and “exposure.” What the trainers did not say, and may not have known, was that their chart had been copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners. From JB: Of course, the chart in question was not copied verbatim at Guantanamo -- the DOD folks had the foresight to make one (and only one) change: They omitted the original title, which was "Communist Coercive Methods for Eliciting Individual Compliance." Lovely. Why do you think that this would be so? I've seen lots of commentary on the revelation that Bush administration torture techniques have been modeled on the work of the ChiComs but not much specific focus on the fact that the main purpose of these Chinese torture techniques was to elicit false confessions. That's not very surprising as the main use of torture in interrogations has always been to elicit false confessions. And why might false confessions be desirable? Oh right, Haynes and his "no acquittals" again... But we don't torture, right? The techniques we use aren't torture - no, no. And luckily for us, some others agree with us. For instance, Vietnam never used torture either - isn't that great? So, when John McCain was a POW in Vietnam, none of the stuff done to him was torture. Apparently, I'm not the only one to notice this dichotomy: How is it possible to know that everything John McCain once said on videotape for the enemy was false, because it was coerced, and yet assert that everything we torture out of terror suspects using exactly the same techniques, is true? If this seems like something straight out of a bad movie, I agree - except this is real, and we are doing it. Nothing more accurately exposes the classic moral error of the Bush administration and its enablers in war crimes. If the enemy tortures, it defines their moral evil and all intelligence gleaned from such coercion is self-evidently false propaganda. If we do it, it isn't wrong, and it leads to good intelligence. No, it's not a joke, and it's not a movie - it's something much scarier. It's called reality.