Join Daniel Pipes on a
fact-finding expedition to Israel's Negev desert. For more information, please click here.
Please take a moment to visit and log in at the subscriber area, and
submit your city & country location. We will use this information in
future to invite you to any events that we organize in your area.
Dear Reader:
I appeared on PressTV, the Iranian government channel, in a program called
The Debate, on July 11. The topic was "Debating
the Morality of Israel & Hamas in Battle" and Hafsa Kara-Mustapha
served as my opponent. Click here
to watch it. The segment is 22 minutes long.Two comments: (1) I don't often engage in advocacy (see here) but Hamas assault on Israel inspired me to take it on now; the result is a good deal more passionate than my usual in-person persona. (2) I occasionally accept invitations from PressTV and similar stations because they offer me an audience I normally cannot reach. Yours sincerely, Daniel Pipes Don't Put Terrorists on Trial
Secondly, what good does a conviction bring? If all goes well, a minor operative will be taken out of commission, leaving the ideological sources, the funding apparatus, the command and control structure, and the terrorist network untouched. A years-long, cumbersome, expensive, and draining effort will prove a point, not damage the enemy. If Abu Khattala is convicted, administration officials can crow but Americans will be only marginally safer. This futility recalls the 1990s, when terrorist attacks were routinely treated as criminal incidents and handled in courts of law, rather than as warfare to be dealt with using military force. In response, I complained in 1998 that the U.S. government saw terrorist violence "not as the ideological war it is, but as a sequence of discrete criminal incidents," a mistaken approach that turns the U.S. military "into a sort of global police force and requires it to have an unrealistically high level of certainty before it can go into action," requiring it to collect evidence of the sort that can stand up in a U.S. court of justice. George W. Bush discarded the criminal paradigm when he dramatically declared a "war against terrorism" in the evening of 9/11. While that is a clumsy phrase (how can one make war on a tactic?), what became known as the Bush Doctrine had the great benefit of declaring war – as opposed to a police action – on those attacking Americans. But now, 13 years later and in part because of the success of this war, the Obama administration has reverted to the pre-9/11 approach of apprehending criminals.
Skip the fine-grain analysis of who carried out the attack. Security depends not on complex court procedures, but on a record of U.S. deterrence established by "years of terrible retribution against anyone who so much as harms a single American citizen." Enemies must expect to face the full fury of the United States when they harm its citizens, thereby dissuading them from committing such attacks in future. American taxpayers turn over $3 trillion a year to the federal government and in return expect to be protected from foreign threats. This holds doubly for citizens who venture abroad on behalf of their country, such as the four embassy personnel killed in Benghazi. Crimes require rules of evidence, Miranda rights, lawyers, judges and juries. Warfare requires full-throated retaliation by the American military. Mr. Pipes (DanielPipes.org) is president of the Middle East Forum. © 2014 by Daniel Pipes. All rights reserved.
Related
Topics: Counter-terrorism
This text may be reposted or forwarded so long as it is
presented as an integral whole with complete and accurate information
provided about its author, date, place of publication, and original URL.
|
||||||||
To subscribe to this list, go to http://www.danielpipes.org/list_subscribe.php
Sign up for related (but non-duplicating)
e-mail services:
Middle East Forum (articles and event reports) Campus Watch (articles, blog posts) Islamist Watch (articles, blog posts) Legal Project (articles, blog posts) at http://www.danielpipes.org/list_subscribe.php |
Monday, July 14, 2014
"Don't Put Terrorists on Trial" - Pipes column in NRO, #1344
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment