From This Can’t Be Happening
By Dave Lindorff

Attorney General Michael Mukasey has caught some flak for proposing, in an address to the American Enterprise Institute, that Congress should declare war on Al Qaeda.

Instead, he should be applauded for his brilliant idea.

First of all, Mukasey is admitting, whether he wants to admit it or not, that the Bush/Cheney program of capturing alleged terrorists and holding them for years as enemy combatants without charge in detention centers in Afghanistan, Iraq, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and various undisclosed locations around the globe, and of torturing many of them, are illegal actions that violate US law and International Law. So let’s give him credit for that.

Second, he wants to make these criminal acts retroactively legal and future such acts legal, by declaring Al Qaeda to be some kind of an entity and to declare America to be at war with that entity. Of course, doing this wouldn’t exactly solve the torture problem, since the Geneva Conventions are fairly clear about the fact that you just cannot torture. You can’t even treat captives in a war in a degrading manner, which pretty much rules out things like stress positions and waterboarding, unless perhaps conducted by polite men in butler uniforms who address the victims as “sir” and deliver hors derves and wine spritzers during the process.

But what’s brilliant about Mukasey’s idea is that it could be so easily expanded beyond just terrorism.

Once you accept the idea that a gang of armed men can be declared war on like a country, it opens up a whole universe of enemies against which the US could declare war.

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