Nation-Building

In response to my previous post about adopting the pirate standard for international terrorists, Dean Esmay raises the point that it might well be used to justify the view that accused pirates or sympathizers have no civil rights and therefore do not enjoy any right to due process or protection under the Geneva Conventions: But there is a danger to this view of terrorism. My own gut says this is a proposal with much merit, but it amounts to declaring that pirates and terrorists enjoy no civil rights protections to speak of. Anyone declared a pirate or terrorist may be killed on sight or, if captured, hung by the neck until dead, dead, dead by a fairly quick military tribunal--what some might call a "kangaroo court." Under such a view of terrorism, for example, many of the inhabitants of Guantanamo Bay would simply be dead now, summarily executed after a quick military tribunal. This is not necessarily correct however. For one thing, the Geneva Convention does define combata...

Legal Affairs argues that we should treat terrorists as pirates , legally speaking: TO UNDERSTAND THE POTENTIAL OF DEFINING TERRORISM as a species of piracy, consider the words of the 16th-century jurist Alberico Gentili's De jure belli: "Pirates are common enemies, and they are attacked with impunity by all, because they are without the pale of the law. They are scorners of the law of nations; hence they find no protection in that law." Gentili, and many people who came after him, recognized piracy as a threat, not merely to the state but to the idea of statehood itself. All states were equally obligated to stamp out this menace, whether or not they had been a victim of piracy. This was codified explicitly in the 1856 Declaration of Paris, and it has been reiterated as a guiding principle of piracy law ever since. Ironically, it is the very effectiveness of this criminalization that has marginalized piracy and made it seem an arcane and almost romantic offense. Pirates n...