Saturday, January 24, 2009

Goodbye Gitmo, hello havoc

With the stroke of his newly presidential pen on Thursday, Barrack H. Obama ordered the closing of the prison for illegal enemy combatants at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba...a move which was immediately hailed by the left and the left-leaning media as a triumph of American values. But larger and more serious questions loom than those of esoteric and lofty ideals of the safe, warm liberal; questions like what is the Obama administration plan for the detainees who will be homeless in a year, and do they even have a plan beyond the feel good move of closing the prison?

Beyond a couple dozen truly frightening human beings housed at Gitmo, the rest are illegal enemy combatants...not criminals, not POW's, but a seemingly nebulous category of limbo that no one can quite describe. But the designation of illegal enemy combatant is neither new or untested, but is both legal and applicable in a time of war. In fact, it has been used before.

In 1942, two groups of German saboteurs were secreted onto our coasts by U-boat for the express purpose of wrecking havoc on the war effort on US soil. Operation Pastorius was the code name for this brain-child of Hitler, and if not for an alert Coast Guardsman on Long Island, the nefarious plot may well have worked. But what happened after the Nazi's were captured in of more interest here.

After their capture, the German saboteurs were put on trial before a military tribunal (sound familiar?). Counsel for the defense tried early on in the trial to get the case moved to a civilian court, and petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court for a change of venue. In the Ex parte Quirin case, the lawyers for the saboteurs were dealt a blow, and the ground work was set to deal with illegal enemy combatants in US custody. SCOTUS said:
…the law of war draws a distinction between the armed forces and the peaceful populations of belligerent nations and also between those who are lawful and unlawful combatants. Lawful combatants are subject to capture and detention as prisoners of war by opposing military forces. Unlawful combatants are likewise subject to capture and detention, but in addition they are subject to trial and punishment by military tribunals for acts which render their belligerency unlawful. The spy who secretly and without uniform passes the military lines of a belligerent in time of war, seeking to gather military information and communicate it to the enemy, or an enemy combatant who without uniform comes secretly through the lines for the purpose of waging war by destruction of life or property, are familiar examples of belligerents who are generally deemed not to be entitled to the status of prisoners of war, but to be offenders against the law of war subject to trial and punishment by military tribunals.
(emphasis mine)

Six of the eight saboteurs were executed one month after their capture, the other two were sentenced to life in prison at hard labor, but their sentences were commuted in 1948 by president Truman and they were deported to Germany.

So over 60 years ago, the Supreme Court of the United States delineated the category of illegal enemy combatants, and a democratic President (FDR, one of Obama's purported inspirations) subjected these men to a military tribunal, denied them a writ of habeas corpus, and ultimately sent them to their death for their crimes. Would that the Democratic party of today had the stones for such decisive action.

The U.S. is at war. The men being held at Gitmo were captured out of uniform waging war against the US and it's interests. No amount of feel-good policy can change those facts, or solve the daunting problems that face our nation.

Nolanbuck

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