It doesn't matter whether we recognized the Taliban as the official government of Afghanistan. That makes no difference. If that were an allowable loophole, it would make the Geneva Conventions meaningless. Any country could simply say to their enemy "we don't recognize you as the official government", to get out of their treaty obligations. The Taliban held 90% of the ground of Afghanistan when we attacked them, which is a lot more than the present government controls.
In the Korean War, we obeyed the Geneva Conventions with the soldiers of Communist China, and recognized that the treaty applied, even though we recognized Taiwan as the official government.
<The prisoners at Gitmo are criminals>
Not according to the U.S. government. That's why they were send to Guantanamo, and never set foot, even briefly, on U.S. soil, so that they won't have any of the rights that criminals have. Guantanamo is Cuban soil, leased to the U.S. (pre-Castro treaty). There are U.S. and international laws about how criminals have to be treated, and treaties we have signed, and a list of rights they have, so our government was very careful not to let them be defined as "criminals".
<done to death about six months ago here by Zonder>
The prisoners are still there. More of them, actually. I'd bet Californians in 1943 had the same irritation, about anyone who kept on bringing up the subject of Japanese-American detainees. "You whined about that last year, will you just get over it and forget about them. Nobody cares about them, they're just Japs." |
