CRIMINALS ARE NOT COMBATANTS

March 4, 2003 - We claim that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed was the “mastermind” who planned the murder of more than 3,000 people aboard 4 aircraft and in offices in the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. He has been arrested and is in U.S. custody at some undisclosed location abroad. If the characterization of him as the chief conspirator is accurate, he is the epitome of evil itself and one of the world’s worst criminals. I have no doubt that the United States government is in possession of sufficient credible evidence to demonstrate that the description of him as the “mastermind” is on the mark.

Mohammed is already a criminal defendant, under indictment for a conspiracy to commit murder which included hijacking and crashing a dozen or so airlines flying across the Pacific as well as crashing a plane as a flying bomb into CIA Headquarters in Langley, Virginia. His capture is being trumpeted as a triumph in George Bush’s War on Terrorism and it is. But it has been a triumph of police work, not military force. The arrest is made, the offender in custody and being questioned. Now the United States must decide how to treat him.

The prevailing view, at least that espoused by the talking heads on Fox, CNN and MSNBC seems to be that he is to be treated as an “Unlawful Combatant” or “Enemy Combatant”, tried by an extra-constitutional Military Tribunal and put to death by an arbitrary act of the Executive Branch. The administration has briefed the subject pointing to similar treatment accorded to enemy agents during the Civil War and World War II. The analogy to those cases is imperfect at best. Indeed the analogy between warfare and the campaign to deter, prevent and punish terrorism is equally flawed.

Classifying people like Khalid Shaikh Mohammed as an “enemy combatant” grants to him a status and an air of legitimacy to which he and his coconspirators can never be entitled. Labeling him as such implies that his activities, his plots, his murders were part of a belligerent campaign in a declared holy war against an infidel culture. It implies that we recognize Al Qaida as a belligerent when we treat the conspirators as military captives by whatever label. It provides to that criminal conspiracy a recognition that they crave and to which they are not entitled.

Bin Laden and his deputies are not warriors in a holy war. They are criminal thugs and perhaps the most dangerous criminals in this or the last millennium. They differ from the Mafia only by the scale and scope of their conspiracy. They represent no greater principle than intimidation and no purer value than extortion. Adopting the language and usages of war when dealing with them blurs that important distinction. It makes of Al Qaida an international political movement when it is, in reality, only a criminal gang.