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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: unclewest who wrote (125085)	7/13/2005 6:06:09 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793868

I was attempting to make a distinction between POWs, and "enemy prisoners captured during the prosecution of a war". People with formal POW status would be a subset of the later group. The formal rules about POW status was created by the Geneva conventions, but that doesn't mean that anyone who doesn't meet the requirements those conventions lay out by those conventions for POWs, instead falls under the criminal group. They are prisoners of war in an informal sense. Since their status doesn't meet the specific formal Geneva requirements the term "illegal combatants" comes up to give a distinction from POWs. Some people seem to think that Bush invented the idea of illegal combatants, and that somehow you have to either have full prisoner of war rights, or be treated as a criminal with the full level of protection that we give to criminals. It might be a good idea to have some form of hearing or review to confirm that they are indeed enemy prisoners, not just people who got caught up in the wrong place at the wrong time, but the application of the full level of due process and presumption of innocence that a standard criminal defend dent in the US gets seems to be inappropriate and not practical. As kholt put it, its not like you can put police tape around some section of Afghanistan while you do a crime scene investigation. The presumption IMO has to be that if the detainee was captured while fighting against American forces that they are an enemy combatant. If you don't have that presumption then I think you'll find less prisoners and more enemy who are just killed on the battlefield. Tim