We Need Better International Legal Frameworks

From Information Dissemination:

So Obama and Cheney gave a little talk on detainees today... It was interesting, and usually something I would avoid on the blog, except I see the way Obama is moving forward on detainees as part of a larger problem how we deal with international bad guys when by policy the US is dedicated to taking multi-national approaches. From Esquire.

President Obama's decision to stick with a modified version these tribunals — "an appropriate venue for trying detainees," as he called them today — seriously undermines his campaign pledge to turn the page on Bush-Cheney's deeply flawed approach to terrorism. No matter how many times he enumerates the "swift changes" by his administration to ditch its predecessor's out-of-thin-air concepts — "war on terror," "enhanced interrogation methods," "unlawful enemy combatants" — Obama continues to promote Bush-Cheney's isolating notion that detainees should be tried in a special, U.S.-executive-branch-controlled system of alternative justice that lies outside of two proven pillars of traditional justice: the military's ever-effective courts martial and our civilian court system, which is held in place by the same safeguards of the Constitution that Obama invoked so many times this morning.

Read more ....

My Comment: While I would (personally) prefer to have international cases examined by some form of "International Court", my experience from working with the United Nations (I worked there from 1989 - 1995) has been one big disappointment.

The UN and other international bodies have a clear vision of what is justice and what is not .... but these concepts will always fail when applied to an arena of conflicting political interests and different philosophies. One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter is very true, and it is because of these conflicting perceptions that any International Legal Framework or International Criminal Court will ultimately fail. The "small fish" will always be caught .... but the "big fish" will always escape.