So Much Stuff

The interview with Cliff May was not shown in its entirety on the Daily Show but can be seen online.  One more reason we love the web.

I'm a big fan of Jon Stewart but not of his interviewing style; he spends less time asking the tough questions than he does giving his own answers.  Nonetheless, this is a great interview, mostly because Cliff May is able to present a cogent and reasonable argument for the treatment to which we have been subjecting suspected terrorists.  I think his argument is wrong for many of the reasons that Stewart does, but at least May was being honest in his position.

What's sad is that Comedy Central is the forum in which this conversation is taking place.  

I think there's a problem here that has been missed, which is that these terrorists represent a class of prisoner for whom there are no clear rules governing their treatment.  We don't want to treat them as prisoners of war and we don't want to treat them as common criminals.  Cliff May rejects the Geneva Convention because Al Quaeda is not a signatory and we have to interrogate these folks somehow, right?  Terrorism is not included as an act governed by the International Criminal Court so there's no help there either.  Maybe we need to treat terrorists differently from other prisoners – I don't think so but I think there's a case to be made there.  The point is: who gets to decide?

Surely, in the United States, these kinds of questions should be addressed by elected officials in conversation with the American people.  They should not be addressed behind closed doors by White House lawyers in memos that we only find out about after a leak.  By all means lets decide what to do with terrorists, but let's have rules for all of them that everybody knows about, rather than sending mixed messages to soldiers and intelligence agents.  

Because then you get Abu Ghraib and Gitmo and do we prosecute or don't we and how much is too much and now we can't prosecute these bastards in the courts even if we wanted to.