How shall we treat Terrorists?

Below a brief reply I gave to a person who wrote the following blog entry in the wake of the recent Supreme Court ruling that allows inmates at Guantanamo Bay to be tried in U.S. courts. It does not address the judicial principle of "presuming innocence unless proven guilty", or the actual innocence of many supposed terrorists (over 400 former Guantanamo detainees have been released without charges and were found to be innocent!), but is meant to be a rather broad and general response to the person's blog entry below:


The person's blog entry:

Incredible that John Kerry and the left would give Constitution rights to mass murderers like Osama Bin Laden. What a sad day for America!
Kerry, Obama and Clarke should not have stopped there, they should have continued and said that if we were fighting WWII today, they would grant Constitutional rights to Hitler and Mussolini.
5 Supreme Court justices made this erroneous ruling. It should and it shall be challenged.
Even the murdering pigs of Nazi Germany received fewer rights under the Nuremberg Trials than what the Supreme Court has granted the terrorists



Here is my response:


It is in degrading others, that we degrade ourselves.
Hitler, Mussolini, and others became dictators precisely because they demonized other people, and in so doing, themselves became demons.
It is in treating other people inhumanely, that we, ourselves, loose our humanity.


Whenever we apply the strict, and time-honored laws of justice in this country to a person who commits the grave crime of murder, do we doubt the due process of the law? Of course not: we place our trust in our meticulous judicial system to bring the murderer to justice instead of us resorting to retaliatory violence. Our judicial system offers "life in prison" sentences. There is even capital punishment (the ethic of which is a different topic entirely).

Why, then, should this be different for terrorists? Are we not trusting our system of law and order to bring to justice those that have committed crimes against the American People? If we cannot trust our judicial system to apply the principles of justice to terrorists, then how, please, can we possibly have any hope in the integrity of our judicial system at all?

You speak as if only certain people "deserve" to be brought to justice under our judiciary system, and others don't. Where, specifically, would you draw the line between those that deserve to be brought to justice under our judiciary system and those who don't? Look at what horrible things murderers have done at times and yet they, too, are afforded the due process of the law.

We need to make a distinction between the ideas of "justice" and "punishment": justice in its highest form has at its aim to restore balance. To serve this single aim in our current society, judicial systems often tend to resort to methods of punishment (to varying degrees of success) and to the separation of the criminal from society for as long as it is deemed that the criminal poses a threat to society. (As yet unexplored is the concept of restorative justice, but again, a different topic entirely).

In this context, I consider it to be vital that we understand that "punishment" by itself does not necessarily equate with the purpose of justice.

The idea of inflicting punishment for its own sake on a terrorist or criminal may, for a little while, "feel good" (in a perverse way) to that reptilian, animalistic part in us, but ultimately what we are seeking to do here is to bring that person to justice in order to restore balance, the act of which may include a punishment. The intent is to restore balance, and not to satisfy any baser cravings, the satisfaction of which through violent means is ultimately harmful to our psychological well-being, and, in the long run, entirely ineffective in combating terrorism or crime.


When Bejamin Ferencz, Chief Prosecutor at the Nuremberg War Tribunal made his case against 22 Nazi war criminals charged with killing over one million people (this case is known to date as the "biggest murder trial in history"), did he seek vengeance for the ruthless acts that had been committed? No. He sought to reaffirm humanity's innate dignity through application of the law.

These are his opening lines to the court:

May it please, Your Honors, it is with sorrow and with hope that we here disclose the deliberate slaughter of more than a million innocent and defenseless men, woman, and children. This was a tragic fulfillment of a program of intolerance and arrogance. Vengeance is not our goal, nor do we seek merely a just retribution. We ask this Court to affirm by international penal action man's right to live in peace and dignity regardless of his race or creed. The case we present is a plea of humanity to law.

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