The False Safety of “Enemy Combatants”

That the Obama administration has chosen to drop the term “enemy combatant” from it’s Justice Department lexicon is, frankly, some of the best news I’ve read in a while. It might be true that I recently derided Ron Paul for claiming that America was swiftly making its way towards a state of fascism — I still take that comment to be generally unsubstantiated, hyperbolic and unhelpful both to a meaningful discussion about the direction of the country and some of the larger goals that Paul champions — but the ability to carry people off to Gitmo and hold them indefinitely without anything even remotely resembling due process was, to my mind, perhaps the most terrifying and draconian element of Bush-Cheney’s influence on the country over the past eight years.

As both Freddie and I argued over at John Schwenkler’s old digs at Culture 11 about this and the use of torture, you just can’t with any intellectual honesty — nor frankly much moral authority, either — propose to wage a war based on the maintenance of a way of life that prizes above all the liberty and freedom of its citizens, when at home you enact policies that are anathema to the notions of civil liberties. To suggest that you can do one while you do the other is just the height of cognitively and morally delusional dissonance.

Quoting myself (does that officially make me pretentious? chalk it up to the cold I’ve recently contracted and laziness…),

Isn’t that the larger point here? That we lose something in our striving for security, safety, and freedom when doing so sacrifices the dignity of other humans who have done nothing to provoke such treatment. Such activity seems to rot our freedoms from the inside and while thongs on heads and nasty words about our loved one’s don’t seem like that big a deal, those are only the tip of the iceberg. And in and of themselves, they are intentionally degrading to another human being, which, at least in the case of innocents who have been incarcerated without any process whatsoever, and ought to be the kind of behaviour we rail against both in society and in the actions of our government/military.

The kind of mistrust and fear mongering that was draped over America immediately following 9-11 and the subsequent horrific policies that were allowed to be unleashed from your primordial insecurities, fears, and aggressions, if left unaddressed, make saving America as a beacon of freedom in this fashion like immortalizing your love for another by choking them before they can leave. Hence my happiness to see the Obama administration choose to take this issue on in what seems like a pretty straightforward manner. The kind of redemption it represents is vital to the country moving forward in any meaningful sense.

One step further, though, I think this repudiation actually promises to leave America more safe, contra the neoconservative lamentations that are likely to follow.

My reasoning goes as follows: the events of 9-11 that, admittedly, fundamentally changed the world in which we live, were not allowed to happen due to a lack of capacity. There have been numerous reports about the intelligence of such an attack surfacing well in advance of September 11, 2001 and summarily being ignored not just by Bush, but the threat that Al Qaeda potentially posed being misunderestimated by Bill Clinton. Had American leaders paid attention to the mounting threat, they possessed more than enough capacity to secure the country. But, generally speaking, those who should have been paying attention simply weren’t doing so with the requisite care.

The utilizing of a term and the kind of broad stroke policies that have been predicated on the term might seem like they effectively address that problem, but I think just the opposite is true. Not only do the kind of infringements on civil liberties that the circumnavigate due process spit in the face of freedom, they also encourage and induce a certain laziness in the kind of intelligence work that gets done in determining individuals who might pose a threat to the country.

The refining of the definition about who ought to be considered an enemy of the state or a potential threat means that the departments and individuals making those determinations have to be a great deal more careful about who they target and why. That increase in care about making such determinations means that there is likely to be a greater focus on going through the information and a greater precision utilized in warranting action.

At base, the Department of Justice will be paying greater attention to the information it has at its disposal, the kind of focus and attention that may well have averted the tragic events that have so shaped our geo-political world. That the order for a sharpening of focus has come from the top seems to indicate that unlike Clinton and Bush, Obama recognizes the importance of such attention to detail and embodies a commitment himself to avoiding the mistakes of his predecessors – which results in a safer country.

Disagreement over Obama’s handling to date of the economic crisis might be a fight containing many dogs, but I think this decision provides some pretty compelling evidence that America doesn’t just remain safe under Obama’s watch, but has good reason to feel even safer.

Tagged as: enemy combatants, Guantanamo Bay, National Security, obama