Please don't put words in my mouth.
Nowhere in the post did I liken him to a petty criminal nor state that he's not a terrorist. I said we've made the choice as a society to act differently in war; more clearly, we have made the choice to not level entire cities, towns, and villages, to leave people surviving, to leave an opportunity to rebuild.
This includes taking soldiers or suspected soldiers -- some of whom may be terrorists -- as prisoner. In doing so and imprisoning them we've made the choice to stick by our system of law and say we offer trials. Free and fair trials, I might add, that aren't precipitated by forced, torturous "confessions" made under extreme duress. We've made the choice that people on the ground don't have all of the evidence and knowledge to always make that decision; thus they don't level everyone and everything. As you said, the unit "decided" he was guilty and not a bystander caught out; our system of law did not, but may have after trial. This is the society we've made the choice to create; we say that we're not barbaric when we live by that.
If our values are truly moral ones, we don't get to choose when to apply them. When we do, we become as guilty as those we call barbarians. Taking a 15 year old prisoner for 10 years and then forcing a confession before trial is possible, and threatening life imprisonment without confession is a violation of what our societies call just. I think you know that deep down, because you wouldn't be defending a dressed up system of barbarism.
RangerGress wrote:
The difference is that you see him as a criminal. I don't. In our civil world, our opponent, in this context, is criminals. To curb them we have and system designed to both protect their rights and also protect society by deterring and rehabilitating those criminals. In war we have enemy combatants, otherwise decent types that have managed to get (earn?) themselves politicians that don't like our politicians, as a result we and our buddies are trying to kill them and their buddies. Nothing personal, just another tragic and disappointing aspect of humanity.
Then we have the terrorists. I imagine my son in that 3rd world shit hole risking his life every day to stand between the innocent families of that country trying to live a normal life, and the terrorist scum that would kill them. I perceive terrorists as vastly worse than the enemy combatant, and orders of magnitude worse than the criminal.