Fighting Words

In the aftermath of September 11 George W. Bush hastily explained that those held in Guantanamo Bay, those who would be water-boarded and sleep deprived, were not protected by the Geneva Conventions because they were not soldiers or reservists, but unlawful combatants. They were civilians who lacked the legal right to use their AK-47s and their explosive devices and, as such, were combatants of an entirely new era.

The 1990s contained a wide range of illegal acts of war—genocide in Darfur and Rwanda, mass slaughter in Bosnia, Oklahoma City, the first attack on the World Trade Center—but none of these brought the understanding of “unlawful combatant” into the public sphere like the American response to 9/11. With the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, America promised, in the words of President Bush in his address to the nation that night, “to find those responsible and to bring them to justice.” In doing so, he was labeling those behind the attacks unlawful combatants and denying them any of the due process which modern civilization has decided is owed to foes in combat. But, more importantly, he promised to “make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them.” With that, the line which divided civilian from solider began to melt away. There began, immediately after the attack, a grouping together of those who perpetrated an act and those who merely supported it, all under the heading of unlawful combatants. Lost was the subtlety of guilt and responsibility behind the broad stroke of “us vs. them.”

But those broad strokes have continued covering ground in the past decade. Last year, as Wikileaks began the release of thousands of documents, Barack Obama and his administration declared that organization to be criminal. Ignoring common understandings of law—understandings which have upheld news organizations for decades—President Obama attempted to charge the organization with the crime of disseminating information, even though they had no part in the gathering of that information. Those who did gather (and, it is true, ‘steal’ is a fitting word here) the information, such as Bradley Manning, faced increasingly harsh punishments. Mannings was only recently released from an intense solitary confinement which was decried by dozens of Human Rights organizations as an inhumane torture.

In other words, it has only taken a short decade to take us from labeling terrorists as unlawful combatants to including civilians, journalists, and American citizens. All are treated in the same (illegal) ways once they have been judged to not be sufficiently behind the American cause. They are unlawful combatants and they will be punished.

This is where we find ourselves today in this post-modern, post-industrial digital age. A false binary choice has become ubiquitous in politics. That framework is a thing which must be rejected. In doing so, we shall be combatants ourselves, combatants of the digital age who toil in information and reason to realign the political sphere on a worthy axis. Seventy years ago, Pascal Pia and Albert Camus, among others, worked to keep Combat, one of the resistance newspapers of occupied France, independent of poorly reasoned positions and undue influence from political forces. This is our ideal.