The worst of both worlds
Slate
by Dahlia Lithwick
08/14/07
Last week in a New York Times op-ed, former presidential candidate Wesley Clark and UCLA professor Kal Raustiala offered up a new sally in the long-running national debate over whether to treat captured terrorists as criminals or soldiers. They vote — for some compelling reasons — for treating the terrorists like criminals. It’s a useful thought experiment, one I myself have engaged in on occasion. But we should probably stop kidding ourselves that anyone, outside newspapers and academia, is strictly choosing between these two systems. Criminal vs. soldier is not a dichotomy the Bush administration accepts. It never has. This president likes to have it both ways: tending to treat terror suspects as soldiers or criminals as suits his purposes. The innovation of his lawyers has been to tack back and forth between the military and criminal law systems, thus avoiding either’s constraints...
http://www.slate.com/id/2172218/
Informant: Thomas L. Knapp
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Wesley+Clark
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Dahlia+Lithwick
by Dahlia Lithwick
08/14/07
Last week in a New York Times op-ed, former presidential candidate Wesley Clark and UCLA professor Kal Raustiala offered up a new sally in the long-running national debate over whether to treat captured terrorists as criminals or soldiers. They vote — for some compelling reasons — for treating the terrorists like criminals. It’s a useful thought experiment, one I myself have engaged in on occasion. But we should probably stop kidding ourselves that anyone, outside newspapers and academia, is strictly choosing between these two systems. Criminal vs. soldier is not a dichotomy the Bush administration accepts. It never has. This president likes to have it both ways: tending to treat terror suspects as soldiers or criminals as suits his purposes. The innovation of his lawyers has been to tack back and forth between the military and criminal law systems, thus avoiding either’s constraints...
http://www.slate.com/id/2172218/
Informant: Thomas L. Knapp
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Wesley+Clark
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Dahlia+Lithwick
rudkla - 15. Aug, 11:39
