Questioning Cheney's legitimization of terror

While former President George W. Bush is keeping a low profile at the moment, his former vice president is apparently taking the opposite approach. Dick Cheney recently appeared on ABC's "This Week" to reiterate some of his criticisms of the Obama administration. If Cheney had his way, attempted Christmas-Day-bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab and shoe-bomber Richard Reid would both be enemy combatants instead of criminals.According to Cheney, the 9/11 attacks were acts of war rather than just terrorist attacks, and therefore we ought to treat the terrorists we catch as if they were combatants we would capture in a traditional war.

This policy makes perfect sense if you just ignore all history up to Sept. 10, 2001. International terrorism-with the United States as the target-existed before 2001. Let's not forget about the bombing of the USS Cole, the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, Pan Am Flight 103, the 1983 Beirut barracks bombing or any of the 120 terrorist attacks involving US targets in 1984 alone. None of these were acts of war, somehow.

In fact, official U.S. policy under Ronald Reagan recognized the necessity of treating terrorists as criminals rather than "enemy combatants," as we would probably say today. Reagan's strategy, as articulated by future Bush administration official L. Paul Bremer, was "to get society to see them for what they are-criminals-and to use democracy's most potent tool, the rule of law, against them."

Treating terrorists as criminals wasn't a new idea even then. In 1981, the United Kingdom was facing hunger strikes by imprisoned Irish Republicans. Why weren't they eating? In 1976, they had lost the status of political prisoners. To the British government, they were just criminals. After 10 prisoners starved themselves to death, the UK ended up meeting some of the prisoners' demands. The "Special Category Status," however, was never reinstated. Why not? As then-Northern Ireland Secretary of State Humphrey Atkins explained in a 1981 New York Times article, "What they want is recognition that they are an army. They want legitimization. We won't give them that. They are criminals.'"

So, if you call the terrorists an army, you legitimize them. What may have been just a decentralized group of rebels suddenly gets a command structure, unity and the authority to fight a war. Inversely, then, call an army a terrorist group and you deprive them of that authority. So, how has the United States fought terrorism since 9/11?

Not very well. The international criminals of the 1980s are enemy combatants today. Terrorism isn't a crime; it's an act of war. Enemy combatants and the War on Terror are both means of legitimation. In a war, there are two sides. Two nations, regions or whatever political divisions you can think of can have a war. Since we've gone to war with terrorism, we've elevated every terrorist group we attack to our level. Perhaps, like his former Commander-in-Chief, Dick Cheney should get started on his memoirs and stay out of the public sphere until he's willing to take a look at history.



- Holley-Kline is a sophomore from Anchorage, Ala., majoring in Spanish. He is an Honor Scholar.