“Unlawful” enemy combatants

What a difference a single word makes. This article only scratches the surface of the absurdity of the US’s efforts to try a child soldier for attempting to kill a soldier of an invading army — who was at that very moment trying to kill him. Never mind that the New York Times, among other fine news establishments, refers to this child soldier as a “terrorist” with a straight face.

Generally speaking, it is illegal for ordinary people to kill other ordinary people. But the laws of war recognize that during an armed conflict, combatants on one side are supposed to try to kill combatants on the other side. If they are later captured, the opposing forces can detain them until the end of hostilities but can’t try them for murder. They have “combatant immunity”: If they killed opposing combatants, they were just doing their job.

What, then, is an “unlawful enemy combatant”? The Bush administration has long been fond of tossing around the phrase, but until the 2006 military commissions law, it had zero legal meaning.

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Reading between the lines, it appears that the judges thought that the Bush administration wanted to have its cake and eat it too: declare all terror suspects “enemy combatants” in a “war on terror” and also try them for actions such as seeking to kill U.S. troops in that war. But you can’t have it both ways; under the laws of war, if Al Qaeda suspects are combatants, it’s not unlawful for them to kill U.S. troops.

[Full article.]