I’ve heard a lot lately, notably last week on NPR’s All Things Considered , about what we should do with the “unlawful combatants” (heretofore referred to as the more popular, but less in accord with White House language, “enemy combatant”) being held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba—whether we should try them with military tribunals or just hold them there or whatever.
It is all balderdash. It’s that because all of those who speak on the subject in America assume that we have the right to keep those men with the justification we’re using. The commentators assume that “enemy combatant” actually means something other than persona non grata—or more accurately just persona non. By declaring them “enemy combatants” The Executive has put them in a sort of limbo. By fiat he has made them an impossible category under international law, thus non-people.
Laying aside, for now, the total breach of all that’s moral and sensible and constitutional and American about what Bush has done, he succeeds in contradicting himself. By declaring war on terrorism, Bush makes all those he captures in that war Prisoners of War, thus subject to all the rights accorded them under the Geneva Conventions, to which the U.S. is a signatory and of which, until this, the U.S. was a primary proponent. Even without a formal declaration of war, The Executive has acted and spoken in such a way as to indicate his intentions. He has, on numerous occasions, called his recent actions against global terrorism war. And lack of formal declarations of war in Korea or Vietnam did not stop the U.S. from treating its prisoners under the Conventions nor of crying foul when our own captured men were not.
The term “enemy combatant” is therefore verbal, intellectual, legal, and moral excrement which has been smeared all over the body politic and, by extension, the American People by this administration.
It is immoral because it denies humanity to captured enemy soldiers.
It is verbal sleight-of-hand, Orwellian Newspeak that shuts down honest and truthful consideration of other humans.
It places undue power in the hands of The Executive by allowing him to uncreate the status of an entire group of people by simple declaration. It is utterly unprecedented in American history and gives The Executive the de facto rights of a king or a lesser diety. And while Bush may think himself selected by Divine Right, that does not change the actual status of those “contained” at Guantanamo Bay—they remain Prisoners of War.
This action by George W. Bush sets an incredibly dangerous precedent not only in that it will allow terrorist groups or foreign governments to declare U.S. soldiers or civilians “enemy combatants” as well, but, more importantly, because it allows The Executive to name anyone he sees fit the same, thus stripping the so-declared of his rights and his humanity.
If allowed to stand, Bush’s actions may very well mark the beginning of the end of American democracy as we know it.
The Executive’s use of the term is immoral, but it represents a deeper amorality in an administration designed only to aggrandize and enrich itself and its political allies by pushing through legislation that enriches energy companies and logging and mining companies at the expense of the environment and the public health. It is amoral in that it enriches the company formerly headed by its second-in-command with a no-bid contract to rebuild the country it destroyed at the cost of thousands of lives and billions of dollars, and it has done so under specious premises. It is amoral in that it passes regressive tax codes that further enrich the wealthy at the expense of the poor and middle-class for the sheer purpose of rewarding its donors and political allies.
It is amoral in that it passes regressive overtime laws that enrich its political allies at the expense of those few hourly wage-earners who have managed to make it to the level of the middle-class.
It is amoral in that it passed a bill purporting to help senior citizens pay for prescription drugs, when in fact the bill enriches drug companies, which are the administration’s political allies and donors, while simultaneously declaring, through a regulatory agency, importation of cheaper drugs illegal.
Its supposed moral high ground, so dear to its core electoral support in the Religious Fundamentalists of America, is a mere veneer—extending only to opposing abortion and restricting the civil rights of homosexuals. In all other ways it has proven to be manipulative and self-serving when it has not proven to be downright corrupt and interested in enriching its donors and political allies.
While simultaneously declaring war on terrorism-a war impossible to win since it pits guns and bombs against an abstract concept-it has declared a de facto war on small business, individual rights, low-wage workers, the middle-class, the environment, and the poor.
If its legitimacy cannot be questioned through the backhanded way it won the election of 2000, its legitimacy can be questioned by all the ways it has violated the Constitution and basic precepts of human rights since.
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