Four-Star General Blasts Bush Enemy Combatant Policy

“It is amusing to recall that we fought the revolution in defense of the rights of man and the civil war to abolish slavery and have now gone back on both principles.” –George S. Patton, General (four-star), Army of the United States

Patton was actually speaking of Eisenhower’s very similar “disarmed enemy forces” policy regarding German prisoners of war. Didn’t know about that one? Following World War II, Eisenhower relabeled some one million German POWs “disarmed enemy forces.” He did this in order to skirt the requirements of the Geneva Convention related to feeding POWs. In a March 10, 1945 message, Eisenhower proposed that German POWs be re-termed disarmed enemy forces because providing the level of rations required by the Geneva Convention “would prove far beyond the capacity of the Allies.” His proposal was approved, and adequate food, water, and shelter were withheld from German prisoners. In order to cover his tracks, the United States then forbade the Red Cross to inspect its 200+ POW camps—the only Western Ally to do so. Essentially, Eisenhower didn’t feel like he could afford to follow the rules, so he changed them.

Concurrent with this name game, the United States handed over hundreds of thousands of German POWs to the Soviets for use in forced labor camps. It also refused to accept the surrender of German troops in Saxony and Bohemia and handed them over to the Soviets, as well. Stalin demanded at least 4 million German workers to help repair the damage inflicted by the German invasion of the Soviet Union. Although this provision was not officially a part of the Potsdam conference, it was implemented anyway, and as of 1947, over 4 million Germans were being used as forced labor inside the Soviet Union. These included the POWs transferred by Eisenhower to the Soviets, the German POWs captured by the Soviets, and a large number of German civilians. “Forced labor,” in case you missed it, is slavery. Patton spoke out against this and was eventually relieved of his command as post-war governor of Bavaria over it.

So, you see, the seeds of Bush’s use of the “enemy combatant” designation were sown when W himself was in diapers—in the frenzied aftermath of the greatest liberation effort in human history, an historical irony if ever there was one. Bush’s gambit is a similar ploy to skirt the rule of law and notions of common decency. Enemy combatants are denied the right to due process, to right to retain an attorney of their choosing, the right to trial by a jury of their peers, and many other basic rights and freedoms that people in civilized society take for granted. A recidivist child molester in Miami has infinitely more rights than some Arab teenager held 90 miles south at Guantanamo Bay who was caught sleeping in the wrong house at the wrong time.

I’m with Patton on this one. It strikes me as hypocritical to tout the superiority of our brand of democracy and the fact that we believe in certain inalienable rights for all people regardless of nationality, then turn around and flout those very principles by willfully breaking our own laws and tromping all over these supposed inalienable rights. How can we call life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness ‘inalienable’ when we’ve shown time and again that we’re quite willing to ‘alienate’ these rights from whomever we please? Would not this whole Guantanamo Bay situation have been a stellar opportunity to demonstrate how fair and just the American system of government really is? Instead, we’ve behaved no better than our enemies. We have become the very thing we hate.