Obama, Bagram, and Gitmo

Many Obamabots are shocked and stunned to find that The Won has seemingly changed positions on the Gitmo/Bagram/habeas corpus ruling.

Friday, the Obama administration announced that it would appeal a district court ruling that granted some military prisoners in Afghanistan the right to file lawsuits seeking their release. You will remember that last week District Court Judge John Bates ruled that three Bagram detainees — each of whom says he was seized outside of Afghanistan — could challenge their detention in court.

This decision has Glenn Greenwald at Salon all a flutter. He opens his dissenting article by painting the U.S. as the world's bully by saying that under GWB, "the U.S. would abduct people from around the world, accuse them of being Terrorists, ship them to Guantanamo, and then keep them there for as long as we wanted without offering them any real due process to contest the accusations against them."

It's not as if we were abducting Italian grandmas from the village market and accusing them of being terrorists. These detainees have serious links to terrorism and terrorist activities, although you couldn't tell it by Greenwald's article.

Greenwald asserts that "these are not prisoners captured in Afghanistan on a battlefield. Many of them have nothing to do with Afghanistan and were captured far, far away from that country -- abducted from their homes and workplaces -- and then flown to Bagram to be imprisoned" [emphasis his].

I think he misses the point when he fixes on the point that they were not captured in Afghanistan. The War or Terror (or Overseas Contingency Operation, depending on who you ask) has always been a war of no front lines, of wide parameters, and unconventional. Terrorists are everywhere, not just "in Afghanistan on a battlefield."

Obama has vowed to close Guantanamo and he has begun to realize that there is no real clear option for placing these prisoners. He made this promise in the warm, fuzzy glow of a campaign, but as reality has set in and the cases have been reviewed, he may be starting to see that some of these men are quite dangerous. I think that by appealing this ruling he is simply trying to leave an option open for where to place these men. It doesn't mean he'll use it.

Greenwald asks you to "leave aside for the moment the issue of whether you believe that the U.S. Government should have the right to abduct people anywhere in the world, ship them to faraway prisons and hold them there indefinitely without charges or any rights at all. The Bush DOJ -- and now the Obama DOJ -- maintain the President does and should have that right, and that's an issue that has been extensively debated. It was, after all, one of the centerpieces of the Bush regime of radicalism, lawlessness and extremism."

To me, all this means is that Obama is reserving the right to detain dangerous people. It doesn't mean he's going to randomly abduct innocents abroad and lock them away. In addition, Bush's policies kept this country safe from another terrorist attack after 9/11.

I've never understood the liberals ardent desire to give U.S. Constitutional rights to terrorists that want to kill us. I've never understood their persistent need to believe that all terrorists need is a hug and for us to get rid of George W. Bush and they'll love us. It's never going to happen, people! These people hate us and have for generations! History goes further back than the day you were born and all you have to do is go back and study their deep rooted detestation of American capitalism and American freedoms, and Christians in general.

The liberals might take another look at the fervent desire to close Gitmo. At least there, detainees had a right to a military review to address those "unlawful" charges. Not so much at Bagram. Our military MUST have a means to detain people suspected of doing harm to Ameicans; simply closing Gitmo, Bagram, and the CIA Black Sites does not make all that evil go away. On the other hand, just because Obama is reserving the right to detain prisoners does NOT mean he's done an about face and turned into George W. Bush.

Calm down.

Rules of Engagement

There is a point in Marcus Luttrell's Lone Survivor when he describes his team's initial encounter with the Afghan goatherds who ultimately got his teammates killed.

Luttrell, Matthew Axelson, Michael Patrick Murphy, and Danny Dietz were assigned a mission to kill or capture a high ranking Taliban official in what was called Operation Redwing. Luttrell was the only one of the four to survive the mission and Michael Murphy became a Medal of Honor recipient.

As they were on the side of that Afghan mountain, keeping watch, they encountered a group of goatherds and had to make a decision whether to let them go or kill them. Luttrell quotes Murphy as saying

"If we kill them, someone will find their bodies real quick. For a start, these fucking goats are just going to hang around. And when these guys don't get home for their dinner, their friends and relatives are going to head straight out to look for them, especially for this fourteen-year-old. The main problem is the goats. Because they can't be hidden, and that's where people will look. When the find the bodies, the Taliban leaders will sing to the Afghan media. The media in the U.S.A. will latch on to it and write stuff about the brutish U.S. Armed Forces. Very shortly after that, we'll be charged with murder. The murder of innocent, unarmed Afghan farmers."

So what did they do? They debated both options, they voted, then they let the goatherds go. And the goatherds ratted them out and they all, except Luttrell, were killed.

This story illustrated to me, even back when I read it in 2007, that the media has no business in American military decisions. The fact that these soldiers had to stop on the field of battle and make this particular life and death decision based on how they would be treated in the media is just crazy. Luttrell says they ALL knew that letting the goatherds go was a bad call. But they didn't want to be raked through the media and called murderers.

This is not something they should have had to be concerned about.

Which brings me to U.S. District Judge John Bates and his decision today that prisoners in the War on Terror can use U.S. civilian courts to challenge their detention at Bagram Airfield.

Ed Morrissey at Hot Air points out that "The Constitution gives the judiciary no role whatsoever in the prosecution of war or in handling the prisoners our military captures. War powers are explicitly split between the executive and legislative branches. The practical reading of this order is that the federal courts have some sort of jurisdiction over military activity in Afghanistan, which proceeds from the equally fallacious rulings about Gitmo."

In addition, Article 84 of the Geneva Convention clearly states that prisoners of any stripe shall not get tried in civil courts.

Ed goes on to say that this order "interferes with military operations by treating captured prisoners as having Constitutional guarantees intended for the maintenance of civil order. Prisoners now will get the right to habeas corpus, turning soldiers into police officers and key intelligence into discovery material. No one can fight a war with a Miranda warning in their back pocket, nor should they."

He's exactly right. There's a nasty wave of anti-American, anti-military sentiment blowing through the courts from the dropped charges on USS Cole bomber Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, to the Urbina decision and the Boumediene decision, to the upcoming Uighur release, and now Ayman Saeed Batarfi's upcoming release, not to mention Binyam Mohamed who has already been released to Britain.

So what would Marcus Luttrell and his team have had to do? Clinging to the side of the mountain with very little room to maneuver, they'd have had to pull out a Miranda card and read these guys their rights? Transported them to a holding facility? Allowed them one phone call and a lawyer? Secure the crime scene?

These nitwits in the judiciary need to realize that the battlefield is not an urban crime scene and can not be treated in the same way. If military prisoners are tried in civilian courts, under civilian rules, where will it lead? Some suspect it will lead to our guys just killing the prisoners rather than going through the headache of the alternative.

We need to trust our men and women in uniform to do what they were trained to do. They don't need us second guessing them.