"In fact, it includes your bedroom, your living room, your bathroom, and every other spot on the planet or off it, and possibly even the thoughts that are in your head."

Wars Are Not Fought on Battlefields
by David Swanson

It's Everywhere

At second glance, the battlefield or battlespace does include the United States. In fact, it includes your bedroom, your living room, your bathroom, and every other spot on the planet or off it, and possibly even the thoughts that are in your head. The notion of a battlefield has been expanded, to put it mildly. It now encompasses anywhere soldiers are when they're actively employed. Pilots speak of being on the battlefield when they have been great distances above anything resembling a field or even an apartment building. Sailors speak of being on the battlefield when they haven't set foot on dry land. But the new battlefield also encompasses anywhere U.S. forces might conceivably be employed, which is where your house comes in. If the president declares you an "enemy combatant," you will not only live on the battlefield — you will be the enemy, whether you want to be or not. Why should a desk with a joystick in Las Vegas count as a battlefield on which a troop is flying a drone, but your hotel room be off limits?

When U.S. forces kidnap people on the street in Milano or in an airport in New York and send them off to be tortured in secret prisons, or when our military pays a reward to someone in Afghanistan for handing over their rival and falsely accusing them of terrorism, and we ship the victims off to be imprisoned indefinitely in Guantanamo or right there in Bagram, all of those activities are said to take place on a battlefield. Anywhere someone might be accused of terrorism and kidnapped or murdered is the battlefield. No discussion of releasing innocent people from Guantanamo would be complete without expression of the fear that they might "return to the battlefield," meaning that they might engage in anti-U.S. violence, whether they had ever done so before or not, and regardless of where they might do it.

When an Italian court convicts CIA agents in absentia of kidnapping a man in Italy in order to torture him, the court is staking the claim that Italian streets are not located in a U.S. battlefield. When the United States fails to hand over the convicts, it is restoring the battlefield to where it now exists: in each and every corner of the galaxy. We will see in chapter twelve that this conception of the battlefield raises legal questions. Traditionally killing people has been deemed legal in war but illegal outside of it. Apart from the fact that our wars are themselves illegal, should it be permissible to expand them to include an isolated assassination in Yemen? What about a massive bombing campaign with unmanned drones in Pakistan? Why should the smaller expansion of an isolated murder be less acceptable than the larger expansion that kills more people?

And if the battlefield is everywhere, it is in the United States as well. The Obama administration in 2010 announced its right to assassinate Americans, presuming to already possess by common understanding the right to assassinate non-Americans. But it claimed the power to kill Americans only outside the United States. Yet, active military troops are stationed within the United States and assigned to fight here if so ordered. The military is used to clean up, or at least guard, oil spills, to assist in domestic police operations, and to spy on U.S. residents. We live in the area of the globe policed by Northern Command. What's to stop a battlefield over yonder in Central Command from spreading to our towns?

In March 2010, John Yoo, one of the former lawyers in the Justice Department who had helped George W. Bush "legally" authorize aggressive war, torture, warrantless spying, and other crimes, spoke in my town. War criminals today usually go on book tours before the blood is dry, and sometimes they take questions from the audience. I asked Yoo if a president could shoot missiles into the United States. Or could a president drop nuclear bombs within the United States? Yoo refused to concede any limits to presidential power, except perhaps in time rather than place. A president could do anything he chose, even within the United States, as long as it was "wartime." Yet, if the "war on terror" makes it wartime, and if the "war on terror" lasts for generations, as some of its proponents desire, then there really are no limits.

On June 29, 2010, Senator Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.) questioned then Solicitor General and successful Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan. "The problem with this war," Graham said, "is that there will never be a definable end to hostilities, will there?" Kagan nodded and simply agreed: "That is exactly the problem, Senator." That takes care of the time constraints. What about place constraints? A bit later, Graham asked:

The battlefield, you told me during our previous discussions, that the battlefield in this war is the entire world. That is, if someone were caught in the Philippines, who was a financier of al Qaeda, and they were captured in the Philippines, they would be subject to enemy combatant determination. Um, because the whole world's the battlefield. Do you still agree with that?


Kagan ducked and dodged, while Graham asked her this three times, before she made clear that, yes, she still agreed.

So a battlefield turns out to be more a state of mind than a physical location. If we are always in the battlefield, if marches for peace are in the battlefield too, then we had best be careful what we say. We wouldn't want to assist the enemy somehow, while living in the battlefield. Wars, even when the battlefield was not, like a god, present everywhere, have always had a tendency to eliminate hard-won rights. This tradition in the United States includes President John Adams' Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, Abraham Lincoln's suspensions of habeas corpus, Woodrow Wilson's Espionage Act and Sedition Act, Franklin Roosevelt's rounding up of Japanese-Americans, the madness of McCarthyism, and the many developments of the Bush- Obama era that really took off with the first passage of the PATRIOT Act. On July 25, 2008, the pressure for accountability for abuses of power had grown too great for silence to continue. The House Judiciary Committee finally agreed to hold a hearing on the impeachment of George W. Bush.

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