No, not at all! The US doesn't give it's "detainees" official POW status because, POWs actually got rights, too! So they are held without legal basis or recourse. That's all fine and dandy, as far as foreigners are concerned. Except, of course, that USians are special and have special rights, so it's bad to treat them the same way.

Reminds me of when a USian was droned in 2011. Suddenly there's an outcry in the US! Never mind that guy was probably more guilty than hundred-thousands of other victims of the US "bringing peace and democracy".

The key word you used here is "probably". No-one will ever know because he was vaporized before anyone got a chance to assess the situation. This is why we have trials.

The key word he used is, that allmost everyday people get vaporized by US drones, who are clearly innocent but are just foreigners and so the outcry happens when a US citizen got hit, who probably was one of the bad guys. He criticizes the unbalance and did not said, that also that guy deserved a trial.

But on the other hand, there is a war going on. And in a war you can't really held a trial for every person you shoot while in a COMBAT .. but if you have a death lists of people you are planning to kill, then yes, if you claim to base your actions on human rights and freedom etc. you should prove that those persons actually are the enemy. Otherwise the step into dictatorship with deathsquads will be only a matter of time, if the best way of problem solving is secretly killing people the government claims to be bad.

Isn't the whole point of "enemy combatant" that it allows people to be held in a state not governed by national, or international law or treaty? "PoW" has actual meaning, rules, treaties etc.

Or they could be treated like a criminal, but that would give them a lawyer, due process and so on.

I think that the US, and most western European governments still shy away from torturing PoWs or criminals. "Enemy combatants" however, are the dixie cups of modern policy. Fill 'em up, suck 'em dry, and throw the crumpled remains in the trash. All with a clear conscience.

> Enemy combatant "held without charges" sounds a lot like any vanilla prisoner of war.

This is a convenience because war is chaotic, and prisoners of war could be held near the front, where people have more pressing duties than to worry about the comfort of prisoners that they only took out of a sense of civility (above some minimal consensus standard.) Once prisoners are away from the front, and resources are available, there's no reason why a prisoner of war should be any different from any other prisoner.

When this treatment becomes "the normal rules of war" and active for years on end, nowhere near a front, it has become a rationalization and a loophole.

I undrestand that there's a good amount of carve outs for wartime stuff.

However, if there's any doubt about whether they even belong in the "enemy combatant" category, it seems pretty basic to allow them their attorney. Otherwise the gov't could claim you're an enemy combatant every time they want to take your rights away, and then lock you up forever.

Sure, eventually it will be overturned, but if the gov't just wants you in there for a bit then that's enough.

There's perhaps a more ambitious argument to be made here about the AUMF, what is actually a war, the classification of ISIS as such, etc. But good luck making that argument in this environment

> "Otherwise the gov't could claim you're an enemy combatant every time they want to take your rights away, and then lock you up forever."

Which is exactly what the judge in this case is afraid of:

Judge Chutkan recognized how dangerous the government’s claims are.

“The government could snatch any U.S. citizen off the street and hold them as an enemy combatant… for as long as it took to come to some ‘final disposition,’” she posited. “That kind of unchecked power is, quite frankly, frightening.”

Unless the US has declared war on itself, the capture of an American POW by the US seems contradictory in principle, and should make any American at least a bit uncomfortable.

If it's difficult to consider whether or not the rules of war apply in this case, then maybe that's because the war being waged is unjust in its scope or fraudulent in its definition.

The reason there are detainees and enemy combatants in addition to POWs is that a POW is someone who was fighting under the banner of another state. If the person isn't wearing a uniform or if they fight for a group that isn't recognized as a state, they are not generally a POW. "Rules of war" apply to POWs in this system.

Boy that sure would be messy if we ever ended up waging war on a series of nebulous non state actors.

Exactly the point!

There's no contradiction of principle, a US citizen can fight against the US in a war without the US having declared war on that individual.

It's happened, some number of US citizens fought for Germany and Japan in World War 2 (and paranoia about it lead to the Japanese internment camps).

One driver for American internment camps for Japanese citizens appears to have been the actions of several Americans of Japanese descent immediately after Pearl Harbor - the Niihau incident: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niihau_incident

It’s an American citizen, not an enemy combatant. But sure, not worth getting worked up over - the concept of rights under the American empire is laughable.

The normal rules of war always apply. Famously, that's the point of them. A state isn't allowed to ignore the rules of war if it finds them inconvenient.

The Geneva Conventions are quite clear that PoWs are allowed to communicate with the outside world, subject to militarily necessary censorship. If charged with a crime, they have the right to choose their legal representative.

> A state isn't allowed to ignore the rules of war if it finds them inconvenient.

Actually, that's exactly what the government is doing. The convenient thing about the "War on Terror" is that "Terror" isn't a nation, so, by the government's logic, they get to call them "enemy combatants" not "prisoners of war" (avoiding all that pesky Geneva Convention business).

>The convenient thing about the "War on Terror" is that "Terror" isn't a nation

The convenient thing about the "War on Terror" is that like the "War on Drugs" it is not an actual war at all...

This allows unethical people to justify all manner of abuse, and inhuman treatment of Individuals

Actually you've got it exactly wrong.

The term 'enemy combatant' was an invented categorization of antagonist during the GW Bush administration to skirt the protections offered by the United States Constitution and the formal rules regarding Prisoners of War, which are of course part of the Geneva Convention to which the US is a signatory.

The rules are pretty specific, and preclude the sort of treatment we've afforded 'enemy combatants.'

https://www.icrc.org/eng/war-and-law/protected-persons/priso...

The reason we call them 'enemy combatants' is so that we can torture them, detain indefinitely contrary to the Constitution of the United States, and hold show trials where we prosecute them for fighting against the US in wars that are certainly illegal from an international standpoint.

More than two months is quite a bit of time to 'figure things out', even by military standards, and I don't see any good reason to deny him access to a lawyer during that process anyway.

I'm trying to find the passed Congressional bill for the authorization of use of military force in Syria that would have declared an actual war, but cannot seem to find which bill it was.