Are We At War?

It was reported today that "A divided Supreme Court turned back a challenge to the Bush administration's wartime detention powers, rejecting an appeal from U.S. citizen Jose Padilla who until recently had been held as an enemy combatant without traditional legal rights." (Via NY Times) In light of the Court running away from this issue for the time being, and in addition to contradictory statements administration officials have made on the matter, Greg Saunders asks the question- Are we at war... or aren't we?

He concludes-

It’s easy to understand why the Bush administration wants it both ways: we’re at war because that gives them more power…but we’re also not at war because they would then have treaty obligations, such as under the Geneva Conventions.

Meanwhile, the AP, the rest of the U.S. media, and the Democratic party say nothing whatsoever about this. No one asks Bush the obvious question: “Is the United States at war?”

I guess everyone intuitively senses that the war’s quantum superposition, in which it exists and does not exist at the time, can only be sustained as long as we don’t observe the issue. If we did, the war’s wavefunction would collapse and it would be either one or the other.

This is a subject I've been thinking a lot about.

I will probably have a more in-depth post of my own later this week. Excited? I am.

[Reposted from 4/3/2006]