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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jacob Snyder who wrote (118021)	10/29/2003 5:52:16 PM
From: carranza2	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

Jacob, here's the text of the Geneva Convention. It is a treaty, a concept that seems to have escaped a lot of people who have difficulty with Guantanamo. unhchr.ch A treaty is entered into by sovereign powers. Think of it as a contract between nations. A contracting power agrees with another to treat the members of the other's armed forces in a certain humane manner. Note that AQ is not a sovereign power; neither has it declared that it adopts the terms of the Geneva Convention as its own. Thus, AQ itself does not adopt the Geneva Convention and there is therefore no legal compunction to treat its prisoners as protected by the Convention. I can hear your objections now--legalism in place of morality. There is a problem, though, and that is AQ and the terrorists have engaged in spectacularly brutal acts and show no inclination to themselves adopt the Convention. Unless we similarly refuse to adopt the Convention, we will lose whatever vestige of deterrence we have. There are lots of technical problems associated with applying the Convention to AQ and terrorists. Read its text, you'll see that there are various notices that are required. How do you reach AQ to notify it of the pendency of judicial proceedings against its detainees? I'm no expert on the Convention. Nevertheless, a cursory reading of its text indicates to me that there is no requirement that POWs be tried. There is a requirement for repatriation at the end of hostilities, which is fine by me. If the US treats them humanely until the War on Terror is over, then repatriates them, it will have complied with the Convention. If an organization wishes to remain shadowy, commit random acts of war against civilians, not wear uniforms, and not identify its members as combatants, why should the martial equivalent of the Marquis of Queensberry's rules be applied to it?