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Apparently the Flying Spaghetti Monster was right --
-- and we already have true pirates in our midst. It's time to call a spade a spade. Take a look -- the writing has some legal-ese, but can be followed by lay people.
I don't know that this will allow the president to do as he wishes with the terrorists, but there IS a potential category for them. Here's the start of the paper.
This article is at Legal Affairs, "The Magazine at the intersection of law and life".
The Dread Pirate Bin Laden
How thinking of terrorists as pirates can help win the war on terror.
By Douglas R. Burgess Jr.
"INTERNATIONAL LAW LACKS A DEFINITION FOR TERRORISM as a crime. According to Secretary General Kofi Annan, this lack has hampered "the moral authority of the United Nations and its strength in condemning" the scourge.
But attempts to provide a definition have failed because of terrorists' strangely hybrid status in the law. They are neither ordinary criminals nor recognized state actors, so there is almost no international or domestic law dealing with them. This gives an out to countries that harbor terrorists and declare them "freedom fighters." It also lets the United States flout its own constitutional safeguards by holding suspects captive indefinitely at Guantánamo Bay. The overall situation is, in a word, anarchic.
This chaotic state is reflected in, and caused by, the tortuous machinations of the U.N. in defining terrorism. Over 40 years of debate have produced a plethora of conventions proscribing acts ranging from hijacking to financing terrorist organizations. But the U.N. remains deadlocked on what a terrorist is. As a result, terrorists and countries like the United States pursue one another across the globe with virtually no rules governing their actions.
What is needed now is a framework for an international crime of terrorism. The framework should be incorporated into the U.N. Convention on Terrorism and should call for including the crime in domestic criminal law and perhaps the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court. This framework must recognize the unique threat that terrorists pose to nation-states, yet not grant them the legitimacy accorded to belligerent states. It must provide the foundation for a law that criminalizes not only terrorist acts but membership in a terrorist organization. It must define methods of punishment.
Coming up with such a framework would perhaps seem impossible, except that one already exists. Dusty and anachronistic, perhaps, but viable all the same. More than 2,000 years ago, Marcus Tullius Cicero defined pirates in Roman law as hostis humani generis, "enemies of the human race." From that day until now, pirates have held a unique status in the law as international criminals subject to universal jurisdiction —- meaning that they may be captured wherever they are found, by any person who finds them. The ongoing war against pirates is the only known example of state vs. nonstate conflict until the advent of the war on terror, and its history is long and notable. More important, there are enormous potential benefits of applying this legal definition to contemporary terrorism."
I don't know that this will allow the president to do as he wishes with the terrorists, but there IS a potential category for them. Here's the start of the paper.
This article is at Legal Affairs, "The Magazine at the intersection of law and life".
The Dread Pirate Bin Laden
How thinking of terrorists as pirates can help win the war on terror.
By Douglas R. Burgess Jr.
"INTERNATIONAL LAW LACKS A DEFINITION FOR TERRORISM as a crime. According to Secretary General Kofi Annan, this lack has hampered "the moral authority of the United Nations and its strength in condemning" the scourge.
But attempts to provide a definition have failed because of terrorists' strangely hybrid status in the law. They are neither ordinary criminals nor recognized state actors, so there is almost no international or domestic law dealing with them. This gives an out to countries that harbor terrorists and declare them "freedom fighters." It also lets the United States flout its own constitutional safeguards by holding suspects captive indefinitely at Guantánamo Bay. The overall situation is, in a word, anarchic.
This chaotic state is reflected in, and caused by, the tortuous machinations of the U.N. in defining terrorism. Over 40 years of debate have produced a plethora of conventions proscribing acts ranging from hijacking to financing terrorist organizations. But the U.N. remains deadlocked on what a terrorist is. As a result, terrorists and countries like the United States pursue one another across the globe with virtually no rules governing their actions.
What is needed now is a framework for an international crime of terrorism. The framework should be incorporated into the U.N. Convention on Terrorism and should call for including the crime in domestic criminal law and perhaps the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court. This framework must recognize the unique threat that terrorists pose to nation-states, yet not grant them the legitimacy accorded to belligerent states. It must provide the foundation for a law that criminalizes not only terrorist acts but membership in a terrorist organization. It must define methods of punishment.
Coming up with such a framework would perhaps seem impossible, except that one already exists. Dusty and anachronistic, perhaps, but viable all the same. More than 2,000 years ago, Marcus Tullius Cicero defined pirates in Roman law as hostis humani generis, "enemies of the human race." From that day until now, pirates have held a unique status in the law as international criminals subject to universal jurisdiction —- meaning that they may be captured wherever they are found, by any person who finds them. The ongoing war against pirates is the only known example of state vs. nonstate conflict until the advent of the war on terror, and its history is long and notable. More important, there are enormous potential benefits of applying this legal definition to contemporary terrorism."
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Ah, yes....