Comment by ExoticPearTree
21 hours ago
To add a little bit to your comment, the US invented the term "enemy combatant" to evade the Geneva Convention rules about prisoners of war. And it also gave itself the right to designate whoever it wants as an enemy combatant.
You have the law, you have precedent, best not to get on the naughty list.
They invented the term because they were being attacked by non-state actors who didn't wear uniforms.
There's a lot of stuff they do wrong but that isn't one of them. In this case, the Geneva convention was just written in a different time.
Inventing the term "enemy combatants" as a label for people who don't wear uniforms isn't the problem. The problem is not even affording them the rights guaranteed to prisoners of war.
> The problem is not even affording them the rights guaranteed to prisoners of war.
I agree. There are really two separate issues.
Circa WWII, the term 'enemy combatants' was created to solve a definitional issue around military 'rules of engagement' (a concept which evolved with the rise of the professional military). There were "enemy soldiers" and "civilians" with separate rules of engagement for each (at least in theory, as the rules weren't always applied uniformly).
As you said, not affording "enemy combatants" any rights after capture is the problem and it's really arisen since the "War on Terror". The only slightly positive sign in all this is the U.S. military is clearly aware U.S. courts won't let them get away with defining a category of human that doesn't have any rights, forcing the military into temporary workarounds like Gitmo. When U.S. courts have been able to establish jurisdiction over enemy combatants, the rulings have not generally gone favorably for the military.
I'm still grateful whenever the U.S. Constitution manages to be inconvenient and annoying to the U.S. government :-). And I hold out some hope we're slowly beginning to claw back some of the unconstitutional excesses of the "War on Terror."
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