{"id":271,"date":"2005-08-05T23:36:34","date_gmt":"2005-08-06T04:36:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/?p=271"},"modified":"2010-12-05T22:15:00","modified_gmt":"2010-12-06T03:15:00","slug":"271","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/?p=271","title":{"rendered":"War Powers, War Lies: Part 7: Captive Taxonomy"},"content":{"rendered":"<address>\n<address style=\"text-align: center;\"><a href=\"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/?page_id=54\">The Big Picture Home Page<\/a>\u00a0| <a href=\"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/?p=266\">Previous Big Picture Column<\/a>\u00a0|\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/?p=279\"> Next Big Picture Column<\/a>\u00a0<\/address>\n<address style=\"text-align: center;\"><a href=\"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/?page_id=390\">War Powers Page<\/a>\u00a0|\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/?p=266\">Previous War Powers Column<\/a> |\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/?p=279\">Next War Powers Column<\/a>\u00a0<\/address>\n<\/address>\n<h2 style=\"text-align: center;\">War Powers, War Lies: A Series<\/h2>\n<h2 style=\"text-align: center;\">Part 7: Captive Taxonomy<\/h2>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">Published in the Maryland Daily Record August 5, 2005<\/p>\n<address style=\"text-align: center;\">\u2018Tis expressly against the law of arms; \u2018tis as arrant a piece of knavery, mark you now, as can be offert.<\/address>\n<address style=\"text-align: center;\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.shakespeare-literature.com\/Henry_V\/24.html\">Captain Fluellyn in Shakespeare\u2019s <em>Henry V<\/em>, IV:vii:1-4<\/a><\/address>\n<p>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 There is, we all understand, something truly new and menacing afoot in this world: a technologically-empowered transnational conspiracy: a movement which takes full advantage of the Internet, the web of international banking, the media, and the sophistication of modern weaponry.\u00a0 The Islamic Terror Syndicate (<a href=\"http:\/\/www.muslimnews.co.uk\/news\/print_version.php?article=4426\">a useful name Israeli intelligence gives Al Qaeda and its many cohorts<\/a>) coolly assesses and uses against us, with barbaric effect, the destructive potential inherent in our transport systems, our utilities, and our urban lifestyles.\u00a0 If we had not appreciated it earlier, no one could fail to understand its significance when it left its calling card on September 11, 2001.<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 In response to this horrifying novelty, the Bush Administration lawyers argued that we in turn needed a \u201cnew paradigm\u201d of war-making practice, and a reinterpretation of Presidential war-making powers to make the \u201cnew paradigm\u201d possible.\u00a0 That cure has been worse than the disease.\u00a0 It makes international outlaws and pariahs of us at a time when we need legitimacy most.\u00a0 This is a very large subject, and this time we address only one part of it, reinterpretations of the law of war in classifying the Muslim men the Executive has seized from around the globe.\u00a0 It is not only a matter of how we classify alleged members of the ITS legally \u2013 but of who gets to make that classification.<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Throughout the history of the laws of war, the distinction between combatants and non-combatants has always been of fundamental importance.\u00a0 Captain Fluellyn\u2019s lament quoted above protests the failure of the French to maintain that distinction when, at the Battle of Agincourt in 1415 (according to Shakespeare), they slaughtered mere noncombatant boys in the English supply train behind the lines of combat.\u00a0 (Spin, it turns out, is nothing new.\u00a0 The truth, if you care: the English were the ones in that engagement to violate the laws of war, murdering disarmed French POWs to prevent them from taking up arms again.\u00a0 The slaying of the boys, meanwhile, was probably no more than Shakespeare\u2019s invention to justify the British atrocity &#8212; giving Henry V his own \u201cnew paradigm\u201d if you like.)[1] Typically, when combatants are captured, they are subject to one set of protections; when noncombatants are captured, they are subject to another.\u00a0 All captives, however, are subject to protection of some kind.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 In the modern law of warfare, that protection of captured combatants, also known as POWs, is enshrined in the Geneva Convention relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War ratified in 1949 commonly known as <a href=\"http:\/\/www.icrc.org\/ihl.nsf\/FULL\/375?OpenDocument\">the Third Geneva Convention<\/a>.\u00a0 The United States is a signatory.\u00a0 Those eligible for its protections include members of uniformed military forces, either regular armies or militias.\u00a0 The protections include such things as general good treatment during capture, freedom from torture, a determination by a neutral tribunal whether a captive is in fact a combatant, ability to communicate with family, access to the Red Cross, and due process in prosecution for war crimes.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Noncombatants, also known as civilians, are protected by the Geneva Convention relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War (1949), commonly known as <a href=\"http:\/\/www.icrc.org\/ihl.nsf\/FULL\/380?OpenDocument\">the Fourth Geneva Convention<\/a>, and these protections include prompt trial on any charges of activity inconsistent with noncombatant status, freedom from torture, freedom from forced relocation, ability to communicate with family, and access to the Red Cross.<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The clear understanding of the conferees who adopted these Conventions was that everyone captured during hostilities is classified either as a combatant or as a civilian.\u00a0 It is true that not everyone engaged in combat or warlike activities receives combatant protections; persons who operate out of uniform, like spies, persons who come from a country that did not sign the Conventions, and persons who operate in irregular militias, are excluded from the protections of the Third Geneva Convention.\u00a0 But bearing arms in a manner that falls short of qualifying for Geneva Three protections still leaves one protected by Geneva Four.\u00a0 If bearing arms in a manner that disqualifies one from Geneva Three protections also violates the law, the Geneva Four civilian protections do not prohibit prosecution; that is why spies can be <em>judicially<\/em> tried, consistent with Geneva Four.\u00a0 But even spies, accused or convicted, can claim the benefit of Geneva Four.\u00a0 All that they are barred from is access to Geneva Three.<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 This legal reality did not sit well with the Bush Administration, which deployed its lawyers to nullify, systematically, <em>both<\/em> POW and civilian protections for anyone thought to be affiliated with the ITS.\u00a0 And owing to the highly indiscriminate methods by which people were soon swept up in various dragnets around the world in the four years since 9\/11, there were a lot of persons the Bush lawyers tried to strip of protection. In their conception, there was daylight between Geneva Three and Geneva Four into which \u201cunlawful combatants\u201d fell.\u00a0 And in that gap there were no protections, either from forced relocation or from arbitrary, endless detention or from error in deeming them outside the Geneva protections, or, as will be discussed next time, from conduct tantamount to torture.<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The beauty of this conception depended in part upon the power of a nation in wartime to detain hostile combatants.\u00a0 Because (as the real-life Henry V realized) there is always the risk that a POW will fight you another day if set free, international law has always recognized that POWs can be forcibly relocated and detained throughout hostilities to prevent this.\u00a0 In the old days, when wars were declared and their endings marked by treaties binding all parties, all wars came to an end, and hence all POWs could look forward to release.\u00a0 In the present \u201cwar,\u201d where no one speaks authoritatively for our adversaries and hence no one can bind them, no treaty can mark its end; hence the \u201cwar\u201d will end only when Bush or his successor so states.\u00a0 Given the unlikelihood of this happening in our lifetimes, being a captured combatant not unlikely becomes a life sentence.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Under Geneva Four, to detain forever someone not deemed a POW, the capturing power would have to try the captive under criminal laws.\u00a0 But \u201cunlawful combatants\u201d unable to appeal to Geneva Four get whatever process George Bush says they do.\u00a0 The Bush lawyers provided for military commissions to \u201ctry\u201d the alleged ITS captives: Executive branch officials reviewable only by Executive Branch Officials using rules which were a mockery of due process even under military protocols \u2013 when and if they chose.<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The Bush lawyers have supplemented their legal novelties of \u201cunlawful combatant\u201d and ad hoc military commissions with the nervy claim of a Presidential war power to prohibit all judicial review of their application of this concept.<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The development of the Bush doctrine of unreviewable, Geneva-less detention was fleshed out in a collection of memos among White House lawyers.\u00a0 These memos, among White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales, John Yoo and Jay Bybee of the Office of Legal Counsel, Attorney General John Ashcroft, and State Department Counsel William H. Taft IV, generated between 9\/11 and February 7, 2002, have been widely reprinted.[2]\u00a0 Selections are appended to at least three trade books on the mass detainment and torture, and the documents are widely available on the Web.\u00a0 The reason for the wide dissemination is clear: the bloodless analytical way in which these lawyers are justifying an outrage is horrifying.\u00a0 You can\u2019t look away.\u00a0 The fact that the victims of this outrage may have been involved in perpetrating outrages themselves obviously does not justify the legal abomination being created, nor detract from the sick fascination of the enterprise.<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The authors fully understand that what they are proposing may be viewed as criminal under international and domestic law.\u00a0 On January 25, 2002, for instance, Gonzales recommends that Bush make a finding that Geneva does not apply to the Taliban, because that finding \u201csubstantially reduces the threat of domestic criminal prosecution <a href=\"http:\/\/codes.lp.findlaw.com\/uscode\/18\/I\/118\/2441\">under the War Crimes Act<\/a>.\u201d\u00a0 And State Department counsel William H. Taft, IV, sends Gonzales a memo on February 2, 2002 which comments: \u201cAgreement by all lawyers that the War Crimes Act does not apply to our conduct means that the risk of prosecution under that statute is negligible.\u201d\u00a0 Which is susceptible of being translated <em>If we all tell the same lie loudly enough and with a straight enough face, we\u2019ll get away with it.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Over Colin Powell\u2019s objections, Bush by memo of February 7, 2002, signed on to the recommendations of his lawyers.\u00a0 And the game was on.<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The game, as we now know, included rounding up Muslim men from all over the world and herding them into detention centers.\u00a0 <a href=\"http:\/\/www.democraticunderground.com\/discuss\/duboard.php?az=view_all&amp;address=102x1510993\">It offended Vice President Cheney<\/a> when Amnesty International in its May 2005 Annual Report <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amnestyusa.org\/document.php?lang=e&amp;id=43C02049FA2549F480256F73005534D5\">compared the centers to the Gulag system<\/a>, so let\u2019s not do that.\u00a0 What we can agree on is that the U.S. detention centers, at Guantanamo, at Abu Ghraib, at Bagram Air Base, at U.S.-based military brigs, and reportedly in obscurer locations, feature imprisonment far from home, denial of contact with relatives, counsel, the outside world, limited contact with the Red Cross (or Red Crescent), interrogation incorporating what most of the world recognizes as torture, and little meaningful adjudication and review.\u00a0 Walks and talks and squawks a bit like a Gulag, but hey, let\u2019s not offend Cheney, an objective man who would certainly acknowledge an apposite comparison were one offered.<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The misery that prevails in this, er, non-Gulag has been well detailed in many places including the various official military reports that have emerged from Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, in Guantanamo translator\u2019s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Inside-Wire-Intelligence-Eyewitness-Guantanamo\/dp\/B000BPG22Y\/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1289361590&amp;sr=1-1\">Erik Saar\u2019s 2005 book, <em>Inside the Wire<\/em><\/a>, in Seymour Hersh\u2019s 2004 book, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Chain-Command-Road-Ghraib-P-S\/dp\/0060955376\/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1289361636&amp;sr=1-1\"><em>Chain of Command<\/em><\/a>, in the reportage of Jane Mayer in the <em>New Yorker<\/em>.\u00a0 The alternative effects of our prison camps on the detainees seem to consist either of making militants where none existed before, or sheer soul-rot.\u00a0 Defenders of the, er, system say that we should not be apologetic for sacrificing the physical and mental well-being of potentially innocent people for our own security.\u00a0 But the notion that having been attacked means you never have to say you\u2019re sorry pales against what most of the translators Erik Saar worked with saw was obvious: that many if not most of the detainees at Guantanamo were neither terrorists nor sources of useful intelligence nor in fact being interrogated much.\u00a0 They were simply being allowed to rot because no one wanted to face the political questions that would be raised if they were released.[3]\u00a0 Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld called them \u201cthe worst of the worst\u201d without having tried them \u2013 and he was the last level of appeal from any tribunal that might ultimately test the truth of that proposition.<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Eventually, despite the heroic efforts of the Administration to prevent intervention of independent lawyers and courts on behalf of the condemned \u2013 uh, detained, the courts were invoked.\u00a0 In two June 28, 2004 decisions, <em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.law.cornell.edu\/supct\/html\/03-6696.ZS.html\">Hamdi v. Rumsfeld<\/a><\/em>, and <em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.law.cornell.edu\/supct\/html\/03-334.ZS.html\">Rasul v. Bush<\/a><\/em>, the Supreme Court upheld the availability of habeas corpus to detainees at Guantanamo and at the Charleston, S.C. naval brig.\u00a0 Michael Ratner of the Center for Constitutional Rights, a lawyer for the <em>Rasul<\/em> petitioners, observed of the mere grant of cert that: \u201cThe administration saw this decision \u2013 even to review their position that no court had jurisdiction \u2013 as a slap in the face.\u00a0 High officials were really shocked by the notion that the Supreme Court could review, and perhaps prohibit, decisions that the president, the commander in chief of the war on terrorism, was making.\u00a0 They believe that the president can do whatever he wants in that war, and that no court in the world can tell him otherwise.\u201d[4]<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Just what the courts are really prepared to tell the President remains to be seen.\u00a0 <em>Hamdi<\/em> and <em>Rasul<\/em> did not directly come to grips with the central taxonomy issue: the Administration\u2019s contention that \u201cunlawful combatants\u201d may be detained without Geneva protections (or Constitutional due process, court martial procedure, or international customary law).\u00a0 <em>Rasul<\/em> did eliminate a secondary taxonomy contention: the view that Guantanamo, being subject to some vestigial Cuban sovereignty, is not U.S. soil and thus a place where the Government can detain persons without access to habeas corpus.\u00a0 <em>Rasul<\/em> and <em>Hamdi<\/em> do hold that meaningful and judicially reviewable tribunals must determine \u201cenemy combatant\u201d status, and this, if fully implemented, takes away some of the reason for and effect of the Bush lawyers\u2019 efforts to open daylight between Geneva Three and Geneva Four.\u00a0 Moreover, they strongly hint that the detainees have constitutional due process rights.\u00a0 If the net effect is that the detainees can obtain meaningful and neutral hearings on their claims not to be enemy combatants, the \u201cunlawful combatant\u201d taxonomy will lose much relevance to detention &#8212; at least going forward, although most of the detainess will have lost years of their lives before that.\u00a0 But the proof is in the pudding, or here, in the remand.<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 In light of this ruling, the Pentagon revised its rules for the tribunals, beginning to make them resemble more impartial vehicles of due process, and the litigation concerning them was concentrated in the District Court for the District of Columbia.\u00a0 Skirmishing has been going on there.\u00a0 During this phase, the Government has been trying to moot out many of the cases.\u00a0 Some detainees have been released.\u00a0 Tribunals have been held for all Guantanamo detainees and determined that the rest are all, with one or two exceptions, enemy combatants.\u00a0 And on March 11, 2005, the New York Times reported that Donald Rumsfeld had hatched a plan to transfer half the detainees to prisons in Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan and Yemen.\u00a0 A series of preliminary injunctions stopped some but not all of that.\u00a0 And on July 15 of this year, one panel of the D.C. Circuit upheld the Bush doctrine of Geneva-less, and separation-of-powers-less standards for the Guantanamo commissions.\u00a0 A cert petition is promised.\u00a0 The story of this effort to expand Presidential war powers clearly has many more twists and turns in the immediate future.<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 One is the struggle with the International Committee of the Red Cross.\u00a0 The ICRC, tasked by the Geneva Conventions as the primary expositor and protector of international humanitarian law, has, for some years before 9\/11 or the U.S. response, been engaged in creating a restatement of customary international humanitarian law.\u00a0 The ICRC takes the stance that customary laws are binding on all nations regardless of whether they sign treaties or not.\u00a0 The two-volume restatement, Study on Customary International Humanitarian Law, came out this March.\u00a0 Its161 Rules would absolutely foreclose the approach taken by the Bush lawyers.\u00a0 Rule 4 defines \u201carmed forces\u201d in a way that may be consistent with the Bush approach but Rule 5 categorically states: \u201cCivilians are persons who are not members of the armed forces.\u201d\u00a0 No third category.\u00a0 It can be small surprise that on April 11, two lawyers from previous Republican Justice Departments wrote in the Wall Street Journal that the Study was anti-U.S. advocacy, and that the U.S. should cut off funding to the ICRC, presumably on the well-known principle that silencing your critics makes everything ok.\u00a0 If the first thing you do is kill all the international lawyers, then you can have whatever international law you want.<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Or maybe you just have lawbreakers and their mouthpieces running a Gulag, and international law be damned.<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 But we had better be prepared for the consequences.\u00a0 Someone, somewhere, is going to try us, quite seriously, for war crimes.\u00a0 And somewhere else, someone is going to commit war crimes against our soldiers because we fail to recognize their own combatants as POWs.\u00a0 Part of our rationale for not treating the Taliban as POWs, for instance, has been that Afghanistan, whose armed forces the Taliban effectively supplied, was a \u201cfailed state.\u201d\u00a0 Yet, as Judge James Robertson of the U.S. District Court for D.C. pointed out, the warlord militias who captured U.S. Warrant Officer Michael Durant in Somalia in 1993, in an incident given wide exposure in the book and movie, <em>Black Hawk Down<\/em>, were not a state either.\u00a0 The U.S. nonetheless demanded assurances that Durant be treated according to Geneva Three.\u00a0 Why should a militia to whom we do not accord Geneva Three treatment be bound to give our soldiers that treatment?\u00a0 There is no good answer.<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Bush and his lawyers will probably not be in power when that happens.\u00a0 But the time will come when their expanded war powers will become war impotence.\u00a0 And it won\u2019t be pretty.<\/p>\n<hr size=\"1\" \/>[1] \u00a0\u00a0See <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Battle_of_Agincourt\">here<\/a> .\u00a0 Justice Kenneth J. Keith of the New Zealand Court of Appeal traces Shakespeare\u2019s reference to the boys to Holinshed\u2019s Chronicles, but significantly, in those chronicles the boys apparently ran away.\u00a0 K. \u00a0Keith, <em>Rights and Responsibilities: Protecting the Victims of Armed Conflict<\/em>, 48 Duke L.J. 1081, 1086 (1997?).<\/p>\n<p>[2]\u00a0\u00a0 At the time of writing this, I was especially using Mark Danner\u2019s <em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Torture-Truth-America-Ghraib-Terror\/dp\/1590171527\/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1289361427&amp;sr=1-1\">Torture and Truth (2004)<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>[3]\u00a0 So concluded the \u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.slate.com\/features\/whatistorture\/pdfs\/FayJonesReport.pdf\">Army\u2019s 2004 Fay-Jones Report<\/a> at 38-39.<\/p>\n<p>[4] \u00a0\u00a0M. Ratner &amp; E. Ray: <em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/s\/ref=nb_sb_ss_i_0_37?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&amp;field-keywords=guantanamo+what+the+world+should+know&amp;sprefix=guantanamo+what+the+world+should+know\">Guantanamo: What the World Should Know<\/a><\/em> at 83 (2004).<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">Copyright (c) Jack L. B. Gohn<\/p>\n<address style=\"text-align: center;\"><a href=\"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/?page_id=54\">The Big Picture Home Page<\/a>\u00a0| <a href=\"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/?p=266\">Previous Big Picture Column<\/a>\u00a0|\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/?p=279\"> Next Big Picture Column<\/a>\u00a0<\/address>\n<address style=\"text-align: center;\"><a href=\"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/?page_id=390\">War Powers Page<\/a>\u00a0|\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/?p=266\">Previous War Powers Column<\/a> |\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/?p=279\">Next War Powers Column<\/a>\u00a0<\/address>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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\u2019t be pretty.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[199,585,1616,1334,469,1629,1630,1633,1617,1657,1613,1611,1647,1639,1643,1631,13,1649,1625,1624,14,661,1361,1636,1661,1612,1620,136,5,1662,1632,71,137,969,1619,1637,662,1650,1642,1622,1614,1615,1640,193,470,188,1654,1658,668,1655,1646,148,1626,125,1645,1659,8,401,1618,138,1635,1634,1623,1651,1644,414,689,68,1638,454,1621,1653,1648,593,1641,867,19,1660,157,712,1628,1656,1627,979,1652],"class_list":["post-271","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bigpicture","tag-abu-ghraib","tag-afghanistan","tag-agincourt","tag-al-qaeda","tag-alberto-gonzales","tag-amnesty-international","tag-amnesty-international-2005-annual-report","tag-bagram-air-base","tag-battle-of-agincourt","tag-black-hawk-down","tag-captain-fluellyn","tag-captive-taxonomy","tag-center-for-constitutional-rights","tag-chain-of-command","tag-charleston","tag-colin-powell","tag-courts-martial","tag-cuban-sovereignty","tag-definition-of-war","tag-detention","tag-dick-cheney","tag-donald-rumsfeld","tag-due-process","tag-erik-saar","tag-fay-jones-report","tag-fluellyn","tag-fourth-geneva-convention","tag-george-w-bush","tag-guantanamo","tag-guantanamo-what-the-world-should-know","tag-gulag","tag-habeas-corpus","tag-hamdi-v-rumsfeld","tag-henry-v","tag-icrc","tag-inside-the-wire","tag-international-committee-of-the-red-cross","tag-international-customary-law","tag-interrogators","tag-irregular-militias","tag-islamic-terror-syndicate","tag-israeli-intelligence","tag-jane-mayer","tag-jay-bybee","tag-john-ashcroft","tag-john-yoo","tag-judge-james-robertson","tag-kenneth-j-keith","tag-mark-danner","tag-michael-durant","tag-michael-ratner","tag-military-commissions","tag-military-trials","tag-muslims","tag-naval-brig","tag-new-zealand-court-of-appeals","tag-pows","tag-president-george-w-bush","tag-prisoners-of-war","tag-rasul-v-bush","tag-red-crescent","tag-red-cross","tag-relocation","tag-rules-for-military-tribunals","tag-s-c","tag-saudi-arabia","tag-secretary-of-defense-donald-rumsfeld","tag-separation-of-powers","tag-seymour-hersh","tag-somalia","tag-spies","tag-study-on-customary-international-humanitarian-law","tag-supreme-court","tag-taliban","tag-the-new-yorker-magazine","tag-third-geneva-convention","tag-torture","tag-torture-and-truth","tag-vice-president-dick-cheney","tag-vice-president-richard-cheney","tag-war-crimes-act","tag-warrant-officer-michael-durant","tag-william-h-taft-iv","tag-william-shakespeare","tag-yemen"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/271","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=271"}],"version-history":[{"count":16,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/271\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1597,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/271\/revisions\/1597"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=271"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=271"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=271"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}