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UK defense secretary sez laws of war need to be redrawn
The laws of war need to be redrawn by the international community, John Reid, defence secretary, will say today, to eliminate the causes of legal anomalies, of which the US detention centre on Guantanamo Bay is the glaring example.

Talking to the Royal United Service Institute for Defence and Security Studies, Mr Reid will argue that the Geneva Conventions, signed in 1949, were written for a world of state-to-state conflict and fail to meet all the needs of today's battles against terrorist groups and insurgents.

"Until recently it was assumed that only states could cause mass casualties and our rules, conventions and laws are largely predicated on that basis," he will say. "That is no longer the case. I believe we now need to debate whether we - the international community in its widest sense - need to re-examine these conventions. If we do not, we risk going on fighting a 21st century conflict with 20th century rules."

One possible move, to which Mr Reid makes an implicit reference, would be to agree a new protocol to the Geneva Conventions to apply the same rules to battles with al-Qaeda-style insurgents, so both sides have a clear duty to obey the standard provisions.
Except that al-Qaeda won't, and hasn't, and wouldn't even if you changed the Convention. This sorta blows the whole theory, doesn't it?
At present the UK and the US say they are not bound by the Geneva Conventions in fighting al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, although the UK obeys its dictates "voluntarily" and that the enemy side is operating in legal limbo.

The US has sought to develop an idea of enemy combatants, who when detained are neither prisoners of war nor ordinary criminals. Extending the conventions would make such fighters subject to criminal proceedings, so ridding the US of any need to detain them in Guantanamo-style centres.
Except that we don't see them as criminals, we see them as terrorists. If they were criminals we'd just return them to Karzai with a sotto-voce hint to dispose of the trouble-makers quickly. They're terrorists, and we're holding them for various reasons, one of the more important being, as long as we hold them, they won't be out there trying to kill Americans.
Mr Reid's speech will focus on updating the international legal system to deal not only with modern terrorism but also with issues of potential genocide and responses to imminent threats.
Sure, that'll go well, just what we need, another definition of 'genocide'. We have one of those already, it's just that no one will do anything about it.

Posted by: Dan Darling 2006-04-03
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=147286