Not by a long shot.
I meant, the Supreme Court ruled (unfortunately) that the detainees are protected under the Common Article 3 of the GCs, which is a limited set of protections. It includes a line about making special agreements with the enemy to expand those protections. The critics should be asking those of their friends who favor the other side to call for some agreements. And they should have asked for this 11 years ago.
[quote=“Ion, post:59, topic:2600”]
Al Qaeda declared war on us in 1996. If you can name a current detainee who opposes that war then please name him.
[/quote]I do not accept it as a given that all the detainees at Guantanamo are or were ever formally affiliated with Al Qaeda. Even if I did believe that, I don’t accept that a quarrel with a non-state entity really meets the legal criteria for a “war.” And even if I did believe THAT, I’d have to take issue with the fact that the detainees have not been treated according to the Geneva conventions.
Again, if any of this was unambiguously legal then those guys would be in a supermax facility somewhere inside our nation’s borders.
Oddly enough, had these been genuine POWs, it would be very illegal to hold them in a supermax.
This isn’t the first time we went to war against a non-state entity. If you don’t want to call it a war, then I’d be curious to know what you call the Civil War (or was that the Conflict of Northern Aggression to you?).
The real problem you’ve got is that you’re not only dismissing U.S. policy now, and dismissing those diplomats and Senators going back to (at least) 1949. You’re throwing out sections of the Geneva Conventions, which was an int’l treaty argued over by various nations. Add to that the Int’l Red Cross, which (I think around 1960) wrote an analysis of their interpretation, explaining the background of the writing of the treaty. They’d have disagreed with you, too. We never would have ratified a treaty such as you’re imagining; not this administration, not any before, and not any of our allies.
As I said, there are better solutions, but they require that our enemies agree to respect some human rights. It’s one thing to fret that they don’t care about human rights. It’s quite another to dismiss asking them to.
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