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Home Front: WoT |
Terrorists Have No Geneva Rights |
2004-05-30 |
BY JOHN YOO Yoo is the professor the Berkeley inquisition tried to come for... ...The reasons to deny Geneva status to terrorists extend beyond pure legal obligation. The primary enforcer of the laws of war has been reciprocal treatment: We obey the Geneva Conventions because our opponent does the same with American POWs. That is impossible with al Qaeda. It has never demonstrated any desire to provide humane treatment to captured Americans. If anything, the murders of Nicholas Berg and Daniel Pearl declare al Qaeda's intentions to kill even innocent civilian prisoners. Without territory, it does not even have the resources to provide detention facilities for prisoners, even if it were interested in holding captured POWs. |
Posted by:Fred |
#2 This guy is considered a "conservative" legal mind, because he literally interprets existing law on the books and does not read into it. For that, the left vilifies him. But I would not call him "making sense." To make sense Yoo would have said what the international laws are and then comment on how the laws are up to 50 years old and make no sense in today's War on Terrorism, whether the battlefields be in Baghdad against Al Fedayeen or in the hinterlands of Pakistan/Afghanistan against Al Queda. Our current problem is that according to Geneva Convention IV, Al Fedayeen and facsimile Iraqi terrorists-in-training get rights as "civilians" because they are citizens of a hellhole country whose deceased leader signed the Geneva Convention of 1949. Al Queda caught in Afghanistan or wherever are "stateless," poor things. Thankfully, the 1977 Protocols I and II were not ratified by our country, or Al Queda would get Geneva Convention rights, too. In practice, Al Fayadeen are equally as lawless as Al Queda, and it matters not that one group has Iraqi passports. To get around this meaningless Convention IV, Iraq should have been declared a "failed" state. Then we could use "aggressive" interrogation techniques with Al Fayadeen et al in Iraq as we do with Al Queda in Guantanamo. Also, mosques would not get Convention protections in Iraq, as they do now. |
Posted by: rex 2004-05-30 2:55:49 PM |
#1 This guy will never get anywhere; he makes too much sense. |
Posted by: Dave D. 2004-05-30 11:29:57 AM |