Guantanamo detainees are not human beings

By Brian Hurt | Published: January 12, 2008

It’s news items like this that make me really, really hate the Republicans:

On the sixth anniversary of the imprisonment of detainees at the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base, a United States judge threw out lawsuit brought by four former British detainees against Donald Rumsfeld and senior military officers for ordering torture and religious abuse, ruling that th the detainees are not “Persons” under U.S. Law, which according to another judge, means that they are less than “human beings”.

Think about this for a moment- Corporations are persons, the court rules that time after time. But human beings are not necessarily persons. This puts a different spin on a lot of arguments- for example, the fourth amendment only guarantees the right “to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures” only applies to people. Simply being a human being isn’t sufficient condition to be a “people” (unlike being a corporation).

Judge Henderson is in place to make this ruling due to Republicans, see here. I find it especially fitting that she was promoted by George H.W. Bush to a seat being emptied by a promoted Ken Starr.

And this isn’t just some wacko judge issuing some crazy one-off ruling that won’t survive an appeal. This is central to Republican ideology. Because remember the original state’s right: that some human beings are not people, some human beings are property. The political parties change, the philosophy does not. We’re returning to that era once again- except this time the difference between a “person” and “property” is not going to be race- it’s going to be economics. The only real people are those who own or control corporations, the neoaristocracy.

Remember this when it’s your turn to be waterboarded.

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  • http://mudabone.com/aietc ben

    I couldn’t agree more. That we need a definition for what a “person” is is ridiculous all on it’s own. This country is rapidly becoming something very scary. Canada’s looking warmer and warmer :)

    btw: I’ve really enjoyed your comp-sci posts.

  • http://weblog.raganwald.com Reg Braithwaite

    From the same article:

    The United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit also ruled that torture is a “foreseeable consequence” of military detention…

    I was watching “The Guns of Navarone” last night and the movie depicts an enemy officer as being villainous for torturing a captured saboteur. Now the interesting thing is that the saboteur is, in fact, an illegal combatant: he was waging war out of uniform.

    How our expectations for the conduct of civilized nations has changed!

  • http://www.linkedin.com/in/robertfischer Robert Fischer

    I agree that this ruling certainly sounds egregious: I get nervous whenever we start to define human beings as something other than human beings. Over here in Christian theology land, we tend to call that “sin“. And I thought the whole question of whether enemy combatants had to be treated humanely was decided by the Geneva Convention: I didn’t realize it was an open question.

    There are two notable points here, however:

    First, this note from the article:

    In a 43-page opinion, Circuit Judge Karen Lecraft Henderson found that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, a statute that applies by its terms to all “persons” did not apply to detainees at Guantánamo, effectively ruling that the detainees are not persons at all for purposes of U.S. law.

    Whether or not Gitmo detainees are human beings isn’t really what was at stake: what the Religious Freedom Restoration Act meant by “person” (see Section 2000bb-1.c) is what is at stake. Did it really mean to say that anyone, by virtue of being human — US resident or otherwise — who feels that their “religious exercise has been burdened” can seek relief from the government in our courts? Personally, as a judge, I’d say “Sure” and pitch it back to the legislature to fix their bad wording, even if that meant a potential slew of court cases in our courts from foreign sources.

    Second, I don’t see how economics get into this at all. The ruling is that people who are enemy combatants aren’t given religious protections under the 1st Amendment (the basis of the bill). The courts have consistently sided with the government that non-US citizens held at Gitmo don’t get the same protections as US citizens (or enemy POWs, for that matter). So this isn’t really a surprise.

    We need to get our legislators in action to pass laws that override the court’s decisions. Quite frankly, I thought that’s why the country elected Democrats in ’06.

  • http://mdpopescu.blogspot.com Marcel Popescu

    Weird that you find it weird :) This is a long habit for governments. Women and slaves used not to be people. Children are not people in pretty much any country. Unborn children even less so. Mentally defective people are not people. Prisoners are somewhat less than people. So are military personnel. Guantanamo detainees are just the last in a long line.

    This was a flaw in Mises’ and Ayn Rand’s arguments, in my opinion. Someone *can* argue against rights for all people, and their position is not self-defeating, because they can always redefine people.

  • Brian

    Just stumbled across this post via Wikipedia. You’re missing an important point about the difference between the legal and common-usage meanings of the word “person.” In law, being a “person” means that it’s possible for you to have standing to sue someone. To illustrate how the legal and common-usage meanings of the word differ, note that corporations are “persons” in the legal sense — they can sue and be sued — but that no one speaking normally would say that General Electric is a “person.” Much of the dispute over the Guantanamo detainees was over whether they are “U.S. persons,” a status that brings with it various procedural rights.

    The D.C. Circuit case to which you’re referring doesn’t say that detainees aren’t “human beings” in a moral sense but rather that a particular federal law doesn’t apply to non-citizens who are outside the United States. The court reaches this conclusion by deploying the legal (rather than common-usage) meaning of the word “person.” This meaning is familiar to Congress, most of whose members are lawyers, so it’s actually a reasonable interpretation of the statute Congress passed.

    While it’s true that the dissent would apply the statute to non-citizens outside the United States, it doesn’t actually accuse the majority of not treating such people as “human beings.” Instead, it simply argues that the word “person” in the statute should be read to mean “human being.” The basic dispute here is over whether Congress meant to use the word “person” in the legal or common-usage sense.

    I think maybe author of the news article you read didn’t understand the legal nuance surrounding the word “person.” Alternatively, the author of the news article may have been deliberately mischaracterizing the opinion.

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