Robin Simcox on Why Terrorists Can’t Always Be Prosecuted
Robin Simcox of the Henry Jackson Society in Britain writes in with the following thoughts on the difficulties of prosecuting terrorist suspects, a subject which he covered in this recent report:
President Obama recently has struck a deal in Congress that will make it easier to transfer detainees out of the Guantánamo Bay detention center. This will expedite the release process of some, though not all, of the 155 remaining detainees.
Indeed, the U.S. will still be stuck with, at a bare minimum, forty six detainees deemed too dangerous to release, but who cannot be prosecuted. In 2009, Obama asked his advisers a pertinent question on this: “If these guys are so dangerous, why can’t we prosecute them?’
There is not one simple answer to this question, yet neither is the issue so complex that governments should not have done a better job explaining it. The state is regularly unable to match up how dangerous an individual is with a specific crime he can be charged with: Guantanamo is just a symptom of the problem, not the root cause, and it is not the only place where suspected terrorists cannot be tried.
However, dealing with Guantanamo first, it needs to be remembered that detainees were not held there as a prelude to prosecution; they were, instead, held under the international law of war. Approximately 60 percent of the 779 individuals sent to Guantánamo Bay were captured in Afghanistan. The U.S. goal was removing fighters from al-Qaeda and its associated forces from the battlefield until the end of hostilities, not conducting a criminal investigation or finding evidence suitable for court. Read more »
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