Many of us, myself included, have had some difficulty understanding why we don't see the world the way someone like, oh, John Ashcroft does.  Why, I often wondered, did my government feel it appropriate to detain people taken off the street in other countries in a military base at Guantanamo, Cuba without charges, process or proof?  This struck me as a problem.

Former Attorney General John Ashcroft did not see this as a problem at all, and would see someone like me as clueless.  Until now, I didn't understand why.  Now I do.  Via Turley, John Ashcroft explains:



Apparently, this is all a matter of how we define "war", and who our enemies might be.  Sure, the phrase "war on terrorism" has become ubiquitous in public discourse, but it's just a phrase designed to capture a sense of gravity.  It's not literal.  At least I thought it wasn't.  Ashcroft thinks otherwise.

His comparison of captives in Gitmo to captured German soldiers in World War II is less than persuasive.  The soldiers we captured worse uniforms of their country, in a declared war with discrete sides.  We didn't impugn their integrity for fighting for their country.  They fought for theirs as our soldiers fought for ours.  That's how real wars work.  Mind you, I'm talking about the foot soldiers, not the masterminds who fashioned The Final Solution, nor those foot soldiers who relished duty that involved inhumanity.  They have a special place in hell.  I'm talking about the regular German who was pressed into service and fought on the battlefield as he was told to do.

There is no comparison with the "war" Ashcroft speaks about.  Some will argue that the soldiers in a jihad don't wear uniforms, so it's foolish to argue that the lack of a uniform makes them immune from being prisoners of war.  But this returns us to the question of whether this is a war, or something else.  Terrorists don't wear uniforms.  Terrorists don't serve a country.  Terrorists don't fit neatly within the confines of our historic understanding of war. 

Yet we ignore the Geneva Conventions under the notion that they really aren't soldiers, entitled to be free from torture, because they are terrorists.  At the same time, we justify keeping them captive without due process because prisoners of war aren't held because they've done any more than fight on the other side of a war. 

This rationale, that anything we chose to call a war thus becomes one, shows a fundamental rift in our American psyche.  We want to be protected from international terrorism, but can't find a pigeonhole to fit it so that it neatly fits within any recognized paradigm that tells us how to address it.  Certainly, calling it a war doesn't make it one, any more than announcing a "war on drugs" allows us to hold drug users captive as prisoners.  It's just a phrase designed by political marketers to make our thinking fuzzy enough to allow the government to do as it pleases.

But John Ashcroft sees this as war, clearly and absolutely.  The people held at Gitmo did nothing wrong other than fight for the other side, and there is nothing to charge them with aside from being soldiers against us.  There is no issue of due process involved, not charges of wrong doing needed.  His conscience is clear.