This post isn't really timely or anything, but it's something that I think we're all wrong to just forget about and let go. The problems of Guantanamo Bay came to my mind the other day, and it seemed as good a reason as any to do a post on it.
The legal system is designed to deal with people who are accused of crimes. It sets guidelines for the sort of behavior that is appropriate. Prosecution of crime is supposed to follow certain rules. Every person accused of a crime is entitled to a swift and fair trial. Swift trials are important. Consider that our main penalty for guilt is time spent in prison. If an innocent person waits a long time for a trial, then they are being punished for a crime they didn't commit. This is highly unjust. Trials need to happen quickly, and they need to be fair.
In times of war, it is impractical to provide every captured enemy with a swift trial. It is also impractical to follow all the rules of evidence, and impractical to follow normal legal rules. Enemy combatants are imprisoned until the war is over. However, this is a tradeoff. When the war is over, prisoners are released. Except for international war criminals, crimes of war are forgiven.
This trade-off is important. Prisoners of war are not criminals. They are people we hold in order to win a war. For normal enemy combatants, we are not trying to enact justice. And we recognize this by releasing them when there is no more immediate threat.
In our justice system, we are doing more than just dealing with an immediate threat. We are using punitive measures to restore justice. This attempt at the restoration of justice requires a much stricter standard of conduct. Accused criminals get speedy trials, are entitled to legal counsel, and cannot have their rights violated without a warrant.
At Guantanamo Bay, we are trying to have both of these models at once. We are holding them out of military expediency, but are unwilling to let them go free as legally guiltless enemy combatants. We are also in the awkward position of holding prisoners in a war that has no clear end condition.
We cannot have people exist in a legal limbo. The situation is a true moral crisis. Everyone is entitled to a fair trial before getting hit with terrible punitive penalties. The people at Guantanamo have rights. Some of them might be innocent, but we cannot know without a fair trial.
If we are at war, it is not against any conventional enemy, and it is not a war that is likely to end cleanly. We cannot simply throw human beings into a prison and hope they die before we have to deal with them.
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