Court Of Fools

Reading the impassioned and often wrong comments following this link on the Supreme Court Boumedienne decision led me to the following response:

"It is sad to read here people speculating as to why the Bush admin neither wanted the captured terrorists to be treated as Prisoners of War under Geneva Conventions, not executed summarily as the laws of war and Geneva would have allowed. Many seem baffled by this. The answer is surely, that POWS cannot, under Geneva, be interrogated beyond "name,rank,serial number". And if they are summarily executed on or close to the battlefield they would neither be interrogated to give information. They would be dead. If the asymetrical war against international WMD seeking terrorists is not to be conducted by the shadows, the questioners, the isolation of the suspected, by harsh and secret methods, just who will conduct it? The San Francisco circuit of judges? The FBI? How about the UN? Wait, let's call on the ICC in the Hague.

The Bush admin did the world a huge service by trying to act on what waffling bodies like the UN have been paralysed over for decades - the treatment of terrorists and "unlawful combatants" or the new breed of mega-terrorists. It is indeed Bush's brilliance, not his detriment, that he realized the old Geneva Rules were useless in the face of a conspiracy so vast as Al Qaeda. If international terrorism had not been stopped cold by America's aggression post 911, the EU and others would probably be asking George Bush for the Gitmo blueprints long ago.

For those as naive as Obama,who trumpet how civilian courts dealt with the 1993 WT bombings, one has only to ask: just how effective were those civilian trials in stopping attacks on the USA and US citizens? Not at all, if we go by the Africa Embassy bombings, the USS Cole and of course the whole run in to 9/11.

Contrast the Bush approach when, with every fanatic in the world supposedly desperate to attack the American heartland, not a single attack has taken place. rather, the terrorists have been constrained, or sucked into killing fields like Iraq and slaughtered, so that Osama now hides in a Waziristan cave and most of his deputies are dead or in Gitmo. This, we are told ,is a failure. The blind sheik rotting in a New York jail after the 1993 attacks who gave us no information on the holocaust of Americans that was to come, is one learns, a success.

If America's standing in the world is low, it is largely because of the dismal and disloyal role of media, American included, in not explaining what is patently explainable: that WMD seeking mega-terrorists do not fall whatsoever under any of the protected categories of combatants under the Geneva Conventions and Rules and Conventions of War. According to the Geneva Conventions, they are war criminals and subject to summary justice.

With the terrifying possibilities of nuclear and bio-terrorism around us, which our enemies have assured us over and again they will use the minute they can obtain the weapons, to give foreign terrorists superior access to US justice than Nazi Werewolf partisans, foreign spy saboteurs in the Revolutionary War, German saboteurs on US soil in WW2 and a host of other examples including captured Barbary pirates if we go so far back, is an act of unbelievable stupidity and nothing more than a Supreme Court supremely out of touch with reality."