The Big Picture and the Closeup

The Boumediene case was another “win” for the Guantanamo detainees. But with nobody leaving Guantanamo without permission on Bush and Cheney’s watch, the Administration is the real winner.

To read the groupthinkers’ policy statements from the decade preceding 9/11, it appears that they believed it was time for the U.S. to establish that it had the military power to do anything it pleased in the Middle East. Somehow this would guarantee our access to oil, assure Israel’s survival, and perpetuate our ascendancy over what the hawks’ fellow-traveler journalist Christopher Hitchens has called “Islamo-fascism.” And apparently Iraq was to be the showcase for this program. But within the echo-chamber that was the hawks’ ruminations, the fundamental truth is that there is no fundamental truth.

But we had better be prepared for the consequences. Someone, somewhere, is going to try us, quite seriously, for war crimes. And somewhere else, someone is going to commit war crimes against our soldiers because we fail to recognize their own combatants as POWs. And it won’t be pretty.