Pentagon: Gitmo Detainees Entitled To Geneva Protections
Update: As it turns out, the initial media reporting on this even has been very misleading. The Pentagon has not given the detainees at Guantanamo Bay any change in status under the Geneva Conventions. Instead, the Pentagon has simply re-affirmed the status the detainees occupied all along.
More here.
Just as the terrorists release video and images showing the decapitation of two of our troops the Pentagon has decided to announce that their colleagues being held down at Guantanamo Bay are entitled to Geneva Convention protections.
Nice timing guys.
Of course, thanks to the Supreme Court's Hamdan deciison the Pentagon didn't exactly have much of a choice in this.
I still maintain that the Hamdan ruling was ostensibly the correct one. In so far as the military tribunals established by the Bush administration are unconstitutional - given that the Constitution grants the authority for defining military policy and establishing federal courts solely to the legislative branch - it was spot-on.
But the high court should have stopped there. The unconstitutional nature of the tribunals was enough. Unfortunately the court went a step further and declared that the tribunals also violated the Geneva Conventions, which require that military prisoners be tried in a manner the law of the detaining nation allows for. Since the tribunals were unconstitutional under U.S. law this part of the Geneva Conventions would normally apply...if we were talking about normal prisoners of war.
The problem is that we aren't talking about normal prisoners of war. We are talking about un-uniformed terrorists who attack from the cover civilian life.
One of the reasons the Geneva Conventions were agreed to and passed by the international community was to deter the type of barbaric tactics employed by the terrorists in Iraq and around the world. The idea was that, by extending the protections of the Conventions only to those who donned a uniform and engaged in conventional warfare, those who were thinking about doing otherwise (like maybe engaging in terror tactics) would be scared straight at the idea of some rough treatment (or summary execution) should they be captured.
But now that we've extended the Geneva Conventions to those who don't even put up a pretense of following them we've changed the nature of the Conventions themselves from a deterrent to overly-barbaric warfare to a weapon to be used by the barbarians against we the civilized.
More here.
Just as the terrorists release video and images showing the decapitation of two of our troops the Pentagon has decided to announce that their colleagues being held down at Guantanamo Bay are entitled to Geneva Convention protections.
Nice timing guys.
Of course, thanks to the Supreme Court's Hamdan deciison the Pentagon didn't exactly have much of a choice in this.
I still maintain that the Hamdan ruling was ostensibly the correct one. In so far as the military tribunals established by the Bush administration are unconstitutional - given that the Constitution grants the authority for defining military policy and establishing federal courts solely to the legislative branch - it was spot-on.
But the high court should have stopped there. The unconstitutional nature of the tribunals was enough. Unfortunately the court went a step further and declared that the tribunals also violated the Geneva Conventions, which require that military prisoners be tried in a manner the law of the detaining nation allows for. Since the tribunals were unconstitutional under U.S. law this part of the Geneva Conventions would normally apply...if we were talking about normal prisoners of war.
The problem is that we aren't talking about normal prisoners of war. We are talking about un-uniformed terrorists who attack from the cover civilian life.
One of the reasons the Geneva Conventions were agreed to and passed by the international community was to deter the type of barbaric tactics employed by the terrorists in Iraq and around the world. The idea was that, by extending the protections of the Conventions only to those who donned a uniform and engaged in conventional warfare, those who were thinking about doing otherwise (like maybe engaging in terror tactics) would be scared straight at the idea of some rough treatment (or summary execution) should they be captured.
But now that we've extended the Geneva Conventions to those who don't even put up a pretense of following them we've changed the nature of the Conventions themselves from a deterrent to overly-barbaric warfare to a weapon to be used by the barbarians against we the civilized.
