Bring back firing squads

You've probably heard about this article by now. Ralph Peters, writing in the New York Post, makes a great point:

Violent Islamist extremists must be killed on the battlefield. Only in the rarest cases should they be taken prisoner. Few have serious intelligence value. And, once captured, there's no way to dispose of them.

Killing terrorists during a conflict isn't barbaric or immoral - or even illegal. We've imposed rules upon ourselves that have no historical or judicial precedent. We haven't been stymied by others, but by ourselves.

The oft-cited, seldom-read Geneva and Hague Conventions define legal combatants as those who visibly identify themselves by wearing uniforms or distinguishing insignia (the latter provision covers honorable partisans - but no badges or armbands, no protection). Those who wear civilian clothes to ambush soldiers or collect intelligence are assassins and spies - beyond the pale of law.

This is the very same argument voiced by my hero and one of our nation's best thinkers, Dr. Thomas Sowell, back in June of 2002. And he used United States history as precedent.

During the Battle of the Bulge, near the end of World War II, some specially trained German soldiers who spoke English put on American uniforms and infiltrated the American lines to disrupt and confuse U.S. military operations. When caught, they were lined up in front of a firing squad and shot. The protections of the Geneva Convention's rules of war are for those who play by those rules.

Terrorists who infiltrate the American homeland are combatants, not criminals, and they are combatants out of uniform who disregard the rules of war, forfeiting the protection of those rules. "Rights" are not things plucked out of thin air. They are products of particular arrangements -- and apply only to those who are subject to those arrangements and who respect those arrangements.

Our nation had no problem with firing squads sixty years ago. The bad people were coming after the good people to utterly destroy them. Instead of letting the bad people win, the good people rose up and eliminated the bad people. Problem solved.

In sixty years, what has changed?