This came up in a discussion at my place of work… Do terrorists have rights, either under the US constitution or otherwise, which we are obliged to respect? Do they even have a right to trial? Are they war criminals, subject only to rudimentary military justice? What would an Ancap society do?
I’m on the fence. Both sides have compelling arguments, and I apparently don’t have enough info to understand it from a Libertarian or Ancap point of view.
are they human beings? Of course they have rights. Fair trials and all that are there to protect the people who need it MOST, not the people who don’t.
Treat terrorists like they have no rights and all the government has to do is declare YOU a terrorist to take your rights away.
Well, I think it’s sort of a “chicken and egg” -type argument. If the US wasn’t terrorizing them first, they wouldn’t be terrorizing it. The middle east loved the US before Israel.
It also boils down to perspective. To the English during the revolution, the founding fathers were surely considered terrorists (tar and feathering tax collectors, inciting mob violence against soldiers, destroying imported goods).
So ask them, “what defines a terrorist?”. They might not have ever thought of it.
Well, in an “ancap” society, no differentiation between “military justice” and “civil justice” exists, a “terrorist” is just an other criminal. So, whatever “rights”, for example, a burglar, a murderer, or a rapist has or not, a “terrorist” has or not.
Are you not sure if they are humans? Are you not sure if all humans deserve to be innocent until proven guilty? Are you not sure if foreigners deserve equal protection under the law? What exactly are you on the fence about? What compelling arguments does the other side have that humans should not have rights?
I am sure of all of that. I guess I’m on the fence about the constitutional part. The discussion got around to “do foreigners/terrorists have rights under the constituion?” I’m somewhat persuaded that they do, but the constitution itself is more or less implicit about such things.
I’m also aware of the Ancap thoughts on a constitution legitimizing central control.
I guess I’m trying to sync the two, somehow.
That’s a very good point. I’ve been reading Noam Chomsky’s book Failed States and one of the things in the book that he talks about is that we call other people who we don’t like terrorists irregardless of our own actions ourselves. Our founding fathers are/were considered terrorists to the British. Many of our foreign interventions could be considered acts of terrorism. In fact, according to www.dictionary.com I come up with these results as to what defines a terrorist
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/terrorism
It seems to me that pretty much all governments fit with the first definition of terrorism. So… that’s kind of an interesting thing to think about.
|
| - | - |
Oh. Well I find discussions about a document that no one signed to be pointless. Sorry.
You mean the fact that a constitution does not legitimize anything?
The constitution does not “give” any “rights”, it only attempts to uphold them. So the question of whether the constitution applies to foreigners or not appears to be quite irrelevant to this discussion.
What do you mean it doesn’t give rights? Have you looked at the first ten amendments? Don’t those indicate what rights we have? No, it would be fair to say that it doesn’t give us these rights- rather it attempts to secure them for us. These rights existed before government. The framers just wanted those rights enumerated so they would be protected against a large bureaucracy.
To answer your question, I was just going to ask you : " How do you know the persons you have in mind are in fact “terrorists”- who says so?".
Here is a good article from todays LewRockwell.com which examines , in a little more depth, the exact same question , and which starts with the observation:
"If I had the power to have one statement of fact be universally recognized in our politic discussions, it would be this one:
The fact that the Government labels Person X a “Terrorist"is not proof that Person X is, in fact, a Terrorist…”
Rest of article here
Regards, onebornfree
a) The US government is clearly not subject to the US constitution, so no, the people deemed as terrorists by the US government are not protected by it.
b) Since these so-called “terrorists” (guilty or innocent) are hostages of the US government, it doesn’t seem to follow that the USG would have any obligations towards their captives whatsoever.
When you say “we,” you are referring to the USG correct? Certainly you as an individual hold no obligations to these strangers, especially the actual murderers in the bunch, unless you voluntarily choose to do so.
“Right to trial,” “war criminals,” “rudimentary military justice”… these are statist (meaningless) phrases. Speaking in these terms denies that system itself is what is guilty.
The question is, what would the market bring? Clearly an “ancap society” wouldn’t do anything with “terrorists,” since “terrorism” is a result of statist intervention in society.
The only problem with this is that this usually turns out to be the one time that the person you’re talking to just doesn’t give a fuck about an appeal to the founding fathers, when they probably do it all the time. Or they’ll just deny that your point has any merit.
What is really strange is that domestic laws try to get to terrorists by defining them as enemy combatants. Enemy combatants have loads of rights under rules of war. On the contrary in a war zone most terrorists would be considered bandits of war, meaning they have no rights what so ever and should be killed by any forces that come upon them.
As for how it should be I am of the option that it is impossible to murder a murderer. It is morally right for anyone to kill murderers.
But it can’t be legally right, we still need the court system to tell us who is a murderer and a court can make mistakes and must never commit murder itself, so no death-penalty because it is legally disgusting even though there is nothing wrong morally with the death-penalty.
As such terrorists should be treated as any other criminal and given the same rights. A private system of justice would probably be efficient enough not to need special rules to expedite warrants and stuff fast enough against people suspected of terrorism. It is just the state system that is so much crap it needs to circumvent itself.
Yes, this does seem obvious.