My post about Guantanamo brought several messages about this perennial issue. Some complained that the Administration is trying to have it both ways by coming up with some novel category of non-POW detainees. Others didn’t complain about the Administration’s actions as such, but simply suggested that the courts could come up with a dividing line for habeas purposes — POWs don’t get habeas review, detainees do. Such a line, they pointed out, would reduce the burden on the court system to manageable limits, since the great majority of the hundreds of thousands of enemy soldiers that would be detained during a major war would be POWs.
I’ve blogged about this general question before, but it seems worth mentioning again; so here are a few thoughts.
1. There’s nothing at all novel about the concept of an enemy detainee who isn’t a POW. To the best of my knowledge, the practice of civilized nations has long recognized that there are two categories of wartime military captives. The first involves (more or less) soldiers who were fighting in uniform within organized command structures; these are generally seen as being entitled to “prisoner of war” status, which means (a) humane treatment, (b) limits on certain kinds of interrogations, and (c) immunity from being tried for actions that consist of “lawful warfare,” e.g., shooting at our soldiers (while fighting in uniform within organized command structures). Usually shooting at a U.S. soldier is murder or attempted murder, and voluntarily being part of a group that goes to shoot at a U.S. soldier is conspiracy to commit murder. But if you’re doing it while fighting in uniform within organized command structures, you get immunity from that sort of punishment — though you may still be detained as a POW for the duration of the war, and in some measure beyond the cessation of hostilities.
The second category, which I stress again has long been recognized by “the laws of war” — in America, it dates back to the Revolutionary War, as the Supreme Court recognized in Ex parte Quirin — is that of unlawful combatants. The quintessential examples are spies and saboteurs, but more generally it also includes soldiers who do not fight in uniform within organized command structures. Unlawful combatants are generally not protected in the ways I describe above; they have many fewer rights (I speak here of rights under international conventions and conventional practice) than lawful POWs. In particular, unlawful combatants may be tried and often executed for their unlawful conduct; they don’t have the “lawful combatant” immunity from murder laws, for example.
“Enemy detainees” is a good term to cover both categories, both POWs and unlawful combatants; though since POWs have a familiar name (POWs), “detainees” has often been used during this conflict to refer specifically to unlawful combatants. So the Administration’s conduct is amply precedented, and generally consistent with American (and, to my knowledge, world) military traditions and “the laws of war.” It’s possible that the Administration has erred in classifying some detainees as unlawful combatants rather than POWs; and there’s debate about whether it has complied with some of its duties under the Geneva Convention to provide a “competent tribunal” (a military tribunal, mind you, not a civilian one) for determining whether those detainees about whose status there’s a legitimate dispute are entitled to POW status. But that’s a matter of implementing the unlawful combatant vs. POW distinction. The distinction itself is very well accepted.
2. This also suggests, I think, that it doesn’t make much sense for purposes of American constitutional law, or the American law of habeas corpus, to provide habeas to unlawful combatants but not to POWs. The distinction is a matter of miiltary practice and treaty law, not of U.S. constitutional law. What’s more, it doesn’t make a huge deal of sense. Unlawful combatants and POWs are both deprived of their liberty by U.S. forces. Both can claim that they really weren’t enemy soldiers, but were caught by mistake. If anything, the detainees who are detained on the grounds that they are thought to be unlawful combatants are likely to be more dangeorus than the POWs.
The conditions of confinement might be somewhat different, especially as to the degree of interrogation to which the detainees are being subjected. (The U.S. has agreed to provide humane treatment to the detainees — consistently, of course, with the need to maintain security — so that potential difference between unlawful combatants and POWs doesn’t much come into play.) But I don’t see why this distinction should make a difference to deciding who’s entitled to habeas and who isn’t, especially since this distinction has historically been an artifact of treaty law and traditional military practice, not a matter of domestic constitutional obligation. More broadly, the historical U.S. constitutional practice has long been to treat all detainees alike for purposes of U.S. constitutional law.
3. Now there is of course one important potential difference, which I alluded to in the first item. Once an unlawful combatant is tried and convicted for his unlawful actions, then he does stand in a different position from the POWs: He’s not just being detained as a prophylactic measure for the duration of hostilities (however long that might take), but he’s being imprisoned for a longer time as a punishment, or even being executed. At that point, there’s a more credible case for civilian court review. I think it’s probably still pretty weak, for various reasons. But he can no longer be squarely analogized to the bulk of other detainees.
But none of the Guantanamo detainees has been tried yet on those grounds. Perhaps most won’t be. Nor is there any obligation — certainly no obligation under U.S. constitutional law, but I think not even under international treaties — to try the unlawful combatants immediately, or within some time of their detention. Since even perfectly lawful combatants may be detained indefinitely, without trial, unlawful combatants may likewise be detained indefinitely, until their trial (or until the government decides, as it may wish to, to release them or reclassify them as lawful combatants).
The current litigation thus isn’t challenging punitive detention or execution, which hasn’t taken place. Rather, it’s challenging prophylactic detention — the very sort of thing that was indeed done to German and Japanese soldiers captured during World War II. And, for the reasons I mentioned above, there’s no reason in the U.S. Constitution or U.S. habeas corpus law for treating challenges to detention filed by alleged unlawful combatants more favorably than similar challenges filed by lawful combatants.
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