So they took in some POWs, one says "no, wait, I'm really one of you, just kidding about the shooting and stuff" and the military needs some time to figure out whether normal rules of war apply in this case. Hard to get too worked up over this, if you ask me.
Reminds me of when a USian was droned in 2011. Suddenly there's an outcry in the US! Never mind that guy was probably more guilty than hundred-thousands of other victims of the US "bringing peace and democracy".
But on the other hand, there is a war going on. And in a war you can't really held a trial for every person you shoot while in a COMBAT .. but if you have a death lists of people you are planning to kill, then yes, if you claim to base your actions on human rights and freedom etc. you should prove that those persons actually are the enemy. Otherwise the step into dictatorship with deathsquads will be only a matter of time, if the best way of problem solving is secretly killing people the government claims to be bad.
Or they could be treated like a criminal, but that would give them a lawyer, due process and so on.
I think that the US, and most western European governments still shy away from torturing PoWs or criminals. "Enemy combatants" however, are the dixie cups of modern policy. Fill 'em up, suck 'em dry, and throw the crumpled remains in the trash. All with a clear conscience.
This is a convenience because war is chaotic, and prisoners of war could be held near the front, where people have more pressing duties than to worry about the comfort of prisoners that they only took out of a sense of civility (above some minimal consensus standard.) Once prisoners are away from the front, and resources are available, there's no reason why a prisoner of war should be any different from any other prisoner.
When this treatment becomes "the normal rules of war" and active for years on end, nowhere near a front, it has become a rationalization and a loophole.
However, if there's any doubt about whether they even belong in the "enemy combatant" category, it seems pretty basic to allow them their attorney. Otherwise the gov't could claim you're an enemy combatant every time they want to take your rights away, and then lock you up forever.
Sure, eventually it will be overturned, but if the gov't just wants you in there for a bit then that's enough.
There's perhaps a more ambitious argument to be made here about the AUMF, what is actually a war, the classification of ISIS as such, etc. But good luck making that argument in this environment
Which is exactly what the judge in this case is afraid of:
Judge Chutkan recognized how dangerous the government’s claims are.
“The government could snatch any U.S. citizen off the street and hold them as an enemy combatant… for as long as it took to come to some ‘final disposition,’” she posited. “That kind of unchecked power is, quite frankly, frightening.”
If it's difficult to consider whether or not the rules of war apply in this case, then maybe that's because the war being waged is unjust in its scope or fraudulent in its definition.
It's happened, some number of US citizens fought for Germany and Japan in World War 2 (and paranoia about it lead to the Japanese internment camps).
The Geneva Conventions are quite clear that PoWs are allowed to communicate with the outside world, subject to militarily necessary censorship. If charged with a crime, they have the right to choose their legal representative.
Actually, that's exactly what the government is doing. The convenient thing about the "War on Terror" is that "Terror" isn't a nation, so, by the government's logic, they get to call them "enemy combatants" not "prisoners of war" (avoiding all that pesky Geneva Convention business).
The convenient thing about the "War on Terror" is that like the "War on Drugs" it is not an actual war at all...
This allows unethical people to justify all manner of abuse, and inhuman treatment of Individuals
The term 'enemy combatant' was an invented categorization of antagonist during the GW Bush administration to skirt the protections offered by the United States Constitution and the formal rules regarding Prisoners of War, which are of course part of the Geneva Convention to which the US is a signatory.
The rules are pretty specific, and preclude the sort of treatment we've afforded 'enemy combatants.'
https://www.icrc.org/eng/war-and-law/protected-persons/priso...
The reason we call them 'enemy combatants' is so that we can torture them, detain indefinitely contrary to the Constitution of the United States, and hold show trials where we prosecute them for fighting against the US in wars that are certainly illegal from an international standpoint.