“The Supreme Court ruled 5-3 ... that the military tribunals used to try prisoners at Guantanamo Bay were both unconstitutional and illegal under the Geneva Conventions. The court made some sense with its constitutional argument, but none at all when it applied the Geneva Conventions to al-Qaida. The court declared that Guantanamo Bay detainees could be tried in military tribunals, but only in ones explicitly authorized by Congress. President Bush could work with Congress to create a tribunal that would pass Supreme Court review, except that the court seems to have ruled that out by applying the Geneva Conventions to Guantanamo detainees ...
The Geneva Conventions intentionally exclude people who operate outside the rules of warfare, which includes al-Qaida terrorists. Yet the court applied the conventions to al-Qaida operative Salim Ahmed Hamdan anyway, arguing absurdly that a provision written to cover civil wars—armed conflicts 'not of an international character' — somehow covered the War on Terror, plainly a conflict of an international character.
If the Geneva Conventions apply to captured terrorists, as the court ruled, then our ability to track these enemies is severely handicapped, as we will be unable to use coercive measures to make them talk... Also, by offering their protections only to combatants who abide by the rules of war, the conventions are supposed to encourage non-conventional combatants to follow the rules. The court, by extending convention protections to terrorists who routinely emerge from the shadows to slaughter innocent civilians before slinking back to their caves, has eliminated whatever incentive to civilized behavior the conventions might have offered.” —New Hampshire Union Leader (via the Patriot Post).
No comments:
Post a Comment