If you haven’t read it, read the entire post (especially the extensive update to the original post) from Kenneth Anderson on the proper way to view people we detain in our struggle against terrorism. Especially his thoughts on how treating them as criminals would distort our system of justice and lead to a lessening of our rights in court:
…we are not morally obligated and rationally cannot afford to offer criminal law protections that rise above certain constitutional and human rights minimums and which presume rationality, deterrence and even a certain amount of humanitarian rehabilitation.
We are not legally obligated to do so, we are not morally obliged to do so, and we shouldn’t do it. But at the same time, we should not lower the standards for our existing criminal justice system, for all its participants, the ordinary criminals and the terrorists – on the contrary, we ought to be raising the standards of that system, strengthening both protections against false accusation and improving the treatment even of those justly convicted. Mingling counterterrorism justice and ordinary justice over time has the effect of both empowering terrorists and lowering the standards by which we treat ordinary criminals – consider, as an example of this trend, the deployment of the Patriot Act – promised and sold to the public as a special measure against terrorism, and yet the use of its provisions even against heinous but nonetheless otherwise ordinary crimes as child pornography. We should not be mingling ordinary criminal justice and counterterrorism in this way.
His thoughts on the application of the Geneva conventions are also worth pondering given the alternately myopic view of many human rights groups and chilling view of the “trash them so we can do whatever we think necessary to the ‘towel heads’ crew.” A liberal order requires laws, and both ways of looking at human rights during wartime are destroying their basis.
(H/T: Instapundit)
