Is a person at home an innocent or a criminal? Is a person abroad a
soldier or a non-combatant? Is a foreign citizen a friend or an enemy
guerrilla?
These are important distinctions. In the past, international
conventions, such as the Geneva conventions, applied to two major
categories: people at home and soldiers wearing a uniform.
Indeed, historically, the division has been two-fold: crime has been
considered an `internal affair' and war an `external affair'. One set
of social rules applied to internal affairs and a different set
applied to external affairs
The Geneva conventions specifically excluded the third category, that
of soldiers not wearing a uniform. But now the third category has
become vital,
Back on 12 December 2001, in a discussion with Dan Minette, I wrote
that
A major dividing line is the power of the government to *classify*
the actions. The kind of classification that occurs is dependent
on how much knowledge can be obtained.
Laws place people into different categories, such as those who are
supposed to be in prison and those that are not.
A court is used to determine whether a person at home is innocent or
criminal. However, this cannot always be done.
... in the case of a war ... the person involved may not be local
and may not be individually identified.
I went on to say
... in a civil war, as in the US between 1861 and 1865, or in a
traditional war, such as WWII, a government will declare a state
of rebellion or war, and those actions serve to categorize people.
But the recent [11 Sep 2001] attacks against the US were by people
who did not affiliate themselves with a particular country.
Moreover, most of those involved cannot be readily identified
individually. Hence, the US government could not declare war in
the traditional sense.
Instead, the process of classification was assigned to the US
President or someone deputized to act on his behalf. The criteria are
whether the person is thought to have
... planned, authorized, committed, or aided ... or harbored
...
those involved.
My question is whether this is a good enough classification mechanism?
Or is it too short on accountability and too open to abuse? How
should a society deal with the person who, although you don't know it,
has been misclassified by computer error? Were the founders of the
United States right in thinking that people in a government, if not
now, then in the future, will inevitably tend towards tyranny, if they
can?
What is a good as well as practical way distinguish friends from enemy
guerrillas?
--
Robert J. Chassell Rattlesnake Enterprises
http://www.rattlesnake.com GnuPG Key ID: 004B4AC8
http://www.teak.cc [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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