December
27, 2006: The United States is not the only country that is unsure what to do
with captured Islamic terrorists. The U.S. has perhaps a thousand such men
imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay, and prisons in other countries. The captives are
not kept in the United States, because of the risk of legal pressure to try
them in American courts, where it is likely that intelligence information,
sources and foreign contacts would be revealed. Other countries have less risk
of that happening, but they still have to decide what to do with the Islamic radicals,
who often make no secret of what they would do if they got loose. Perhaps the
strangest situation is found in northern Iraq, where the autonomous Kurdish
government holds nearly two thousand Islamic terrorists, or men suspected of
being terrorists. The Kurds have captured these men over the last few
years, which is one reason the Kurds have managed to keep their territory
largely free of terrorist violence. Thus the Kurds are reluctant to let any of
these prisoners free. The Kurds know, for example, that dozens of the men the
United States has freed from Guantanamo Bay, were subsequently caught
participating in terrorist operations. For many of these terrorist captives,
world wide, there is not enough hard evidence to convict them in a traditional
court trial. But that would be like trying to convict soldiers, caught not
wearing a uniform, of being at war with you. That's the problem with a
war against terrorists. To succeed, the terrorists have to remain undetected.
Those that are caught, are often guilty only of talking about committing
terrorist acts, not actually doing, or even attempting, it. On one extreme, the
suspected terrorists can be treated as criminals, prosecuted, and released if a
case cannot be made in court. But the point of terrorism is to terrorize, and
when you do that, many nations are willing to just lock up terrorists, and keep
them locked up until the terror goes away. Politicians, although under a lot of
pressure to treat the terrorists as common criminals, also know they would be
toast if an "innocent" terrorist was later caught killing people.
