Words matter.Especially when those words define the legal status of an individual. For all of the years that the Bush administration waged a "war on terror," it detained people it claimed were dangerous in places like Guantanamo Bay. They claimed these detainees had no due process rights under U.S. law because they were being held outside of the United States. They also claimed that the Geneva Accords and other international law did not apply to them because they were not "prisoners of war".
In other words, calling them "enemy combatants" allowed the U.S. government to hold these prisoners without trial, or any other basic rights or procedures that we as Americans believe are essential to a system of justice.
Finally, the Obama administration has announced that it will cease to use this term. It may seem trivial, but in this case, it is an important step back toward living up to our ideals of constitutionalism.
BBC NEWS Americas US drops 'enemy combatant' term
U.S. Won’t Label Terror Suspects as ‘Combatants’ - New York Times
1 comment:
Knowing how deceitful our government can be worries me. How could the Bush administration be allowed to run a facility like Guantanamo Bay and not be stopped at all? Guantanamo Bay is a modern day concentration camps that we used for the Chinese Americans. Hasn’t America learned from their past? I think the way the Bush Administration reacted to September 11th was exaggerated and unnecessary. We could have captured and detained people in a more efficient way then just discriminating on how people dressed or what religion they believed. Even though they captured the terrorist they wanted the information they collected hasn’t helped us catch Osama Bin Laden and all those terrorist will most likely go free because the information obtained by them was in a n unlawful way. All Guantanamo Bay has done for us is put a dark cloud of generalization on all Americans and disgraced our historically great democracy.
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