While your post was well put together Quetzal, I am in near total disagreement.
I think "criminal" is the best term for any terrorist. "Combatant" has a totally different meaning and one which I don't think is useful to apply in this situation.
From a pragmatic standpoint, there are wars and there are actions of violence. The first is fought for what one could call "honest" reasons. It is an action by a large and identifiable collective, against another for some specific gain. They follow certain rules and tempos.
The latter (acts of violence) can be conducted by ANYONE. And I do mean any ONE.
While Al-Queda may have sponsored 9-11 it could very well have been executed by 19 disgruntled employees of airline companies. It was 19 men with knives and boxcutters. That is it. There was no follow up actions to continue "gaining ground" toward a final victory of set conditions.
In Oklahoma 2 men with no backing managed to bring down an entire federal building.
One man could just as easily have done it. In fact individuals have commited acts of terrorism at abortion clinics using bombs and guns.
Terrorism comes from within one's one country as well as without. It is simply the use of sudden/violent action to shock and terrify some other group.
Since this falls clearly outside "rules of war" what is the point of elevating its legitimacy (or purpose) by calling it war? And how then does bringing the military into the picture solve anything?
You say the agencies which go after criminals are not the appropriate agencies to respond to terrorism. How so?
Generally with every terrorist act the lines of "who dunnit?" must be determined and mapped. The military does not have the best training and resources to handle this.
In most cases those involved are not in forces too large for law enforcement agencies to handle. When it turns out that they are, or outside of an organization's jurisdiction, only at that time would it make sense to bring in military forces as an aid.
I would like a clearer explanation of how considering every terrorist act an act of "war" would have helped any recent act of terrorism we had to deal with... particularly those where the terrorists were internal to the US.
I believe labelling such acts as "criminal" also help define the concept of "war crimes". If terrorism is simply an act of war, then once war occurs anything is allowed? I would think not, and it would be convenient to be able to point to a commander or company and say their actions XY and Z made them criminal, while their comrades also killing in wartime was something different.
As a final note, the Patriot Act is unnecessary, even if law enforcement is the correct force to be used against terrorists. It is based on the attractive, if false, idea that pre-emptive action against terrorism in all of its forms (or most of them) is possible. Law enforcement is best utilized as point defense or pursuit of criminals after a crime has been commited. Thus considering terrorists as criminals has no necessary link to the Patriot Act's existence.
------------------
holmes
™ Version 4.2