![]() ![]() ![]() may kill any suspected terrorist in any state on earth at any time. citizens may be designated unlawful combatants by executive fiat and held indefinitely without charge or access to attorneys, and that the U.S. government to argue, among other things, that detainees at Guantanamo may be held indefinitely without charge that even U.S. The breakdown of these once straightforward distinctions has allowed the U.S. Shifts in the nature of security threats have broken down once tenable distinctions between situations of armed conflict and situations of internal disturbance that do not rise to the level of armed conflict, between states and non-state actors, between combatants and civilians, between geographic zones in which conflict is occurring and zones in which conflict is not occurring, between temporal moments in which there is no conflict and temporal moments in which there is conflict, and between matters that clearly affect the security of the nation and matters that clearly do not. September 11 and its aftermath have highlighted the increasing incoherence and irrelevance of these traditional legal categories. In almost every sphere, the process of globalization has problematized once straightforward legal categories, but this is nowhere more apparent and more troubling than in the realm of armed conflict and national security. This article asserts that these distinctions are no longer tenable. courts have developed a constitutional and statutory jurisprudence that distinguishes between national security issues and domestic questions, with the courts subjecting government actions to far less scrutiny when those actions are taken in the name of national security. From an international law perspective, the law of armed conflict is triggered only when a armed conflict actually exists the rest of the time, other bodies of law are applicable. Both international and domestic law take as a basic premise the notion that it is possible, important, and usually fairly straightforward to distinguish between war and peace, emergencies and normality, the foreign and the domestic, the external and the internal. ![]()
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