AKA “why North Korea has nukes”.
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Not really a war, more of an AUMF that let’s America bomb anyone, anywhere, at any time.
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Hmm. The War on Terrific? No, that doesn’t help. We have always been at war with terrific.
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Exactly. The GWAT. Which, as many have said, appears about as successful and efficient as the War on Drugs.
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He’s really unclear on the concept, isn’t he? Protocols ! and II were added because there were situations that arose after Word War II that weren’t adequately covered by the original Conventions, while affirming that the original Conventions remained fully in force. The intention was clearly to cover all wars, even after the changing nature of war added new wrinkles.
All of which is irrelevant - the terms for the detention of civilians are covered in the 1949 Conventions which the USA ratified.
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Or the cunning, wit, sex appeal or towel.
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We just can’t quit them.
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Of course they’re not going to stop doing it. Which is why it’s a pointless “war” you can’t win. As long as we have lots of energy and technology (that produces things like bombs) at the disposal of individuals, who are either crazy loons or determined fanatics or possibly just extremely irate people we have injured, we will have terrorism. The only way to stop it is to 1) get rid of this having lots of energy available to the average person (i.e., go back to the dark ages), 2) seek out every person with mental health issues and treat them or lock them away (applies to fanatics also), and/or stop pissing people off with stupid political, military, or business decisions (which, by the way, seemed to have all congealed into a big monstrous blob).
What you have to do is be precise and smart and legal, which the US has been atrociously bad at.
Furthermore, we have totally forgotten the other side of the coin. The goal of these people is to terrorize people. In the US, they have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. Instead of trying to calm people down (remember the “Keep Calm and Carry On” posters in Britain during WWII?), and reminding them that their chances of getting hurt by terrorists is exceedingly small, conservatives in particular have done everything they possibly can to keep people scared, for political, power, and buckets-of-money reasons. Absolutely no effort is being made that I can see to remind people we are safer than ever, from disease, pollution, starvation, etc. That is, until the Republicans majority gets their hands on it.
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If this thinking is true, then why aren’t we doing anything about the huge number of white extremist attacks. The republicans rarely mention them.
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Or, as I call it, the Global War Of Terror.
If you’re fighting a war, on drugs, you’re probably not going to win.
On the bright side, we’re winning the War On Poverty. We’re really kicking those poor people’s asses!
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That just flew right by you. Situations arose that weren’t adequately covered. In other words, the Conventions don’t apply to all situations.
Let’s go to the actual documents: Common Article 1 says that the Conventions are important, and should be followed no matter how desperate we may think the situation is. That part you’ll certainly nod your head to. Good.
Common Article 2 says that the Conventions apply to all wars between two or more countries. This is where you run into trouble. Neither al-Qaeda nor the Taliban are countries. But don’t fret yet.
Common Article 3 was created after WWII to apply to internal wars. Contrary to what you may wish for, the Conventions were not written by the jihadi lawyers at the CCR. The men who did write it had been sent by their governments, and were not going to give a lot of protections to radicals who might revolt against their governments. They gave only the barest amount of protection. As I said many times, there is no POW status for detainees unless the parties come to an agreement. They must get trials, but only if they’re going to be sentenced. Locking up for the duration of a civil war is not sentencing.
The Protocols came later, but they’re irrelevant here, other than to point out again that they were added because the main Conventions do not cover everything in all wars.
From the beginning, the Bush administration gave Common Article 3 status to Taliban detainees, since theirs was a civil war. In 2003 or 2004, the military at Guantanamo decided to effectively treat all al-Qaeda detainees as if they had it, too. In 2006, the Supreme Court made it official that al-Qaeda detainees should have it, too.
But, again, they only have Common Article 3. They can be held without trial until the end of the war, and they don’t have POW status.
Detention of civilians is covered by the Fourth Geneva Convention, which also has the same Common Article 3 (hence the term “Common Article”). In other words, the balance of the fourth convention doesn’t apply to this war. Only Common Article 3 does. And even if it did, it includes a provision for holding saboteurs for as long as the situation requires. No POW status needed there either.
The Uyghurs we’d captured were militants related to the Turkistan Islamic Party. They had a training camp in Afghanistan. They later sent fighters to Syria. China had good reason to want them back.
One of the Gitmo Uyghurs had seriously beaten a female medical or dental assistant. I don’t know which country took him in for resettlement, but I hope it was far from here.
The bounty hunter meme is misleading crap. In most such cases, the “bounty hunters” were either the Northern Alliance or the Pakistani government. You’ll see pictures of flyers that the U.S. government printed offering rewards. What they don’t tell you is that the flyers sent to Pakistan were put in storage at the U.S. embassy because they didn’t want to agitate the locals.
That is a legal interpretation, again, is this your opinion or the opinion of an authority?
You are arguing as if you haven’t made your point clear, as if we only understood it, we would agree. This is not the case. You will actually have to make the case that “Situations arose that weren’t adequately covered”, just because an authority has said this is the case, does not make it something that cannot be challenged.
Other’s have contested your facts, I am contesting your argument. It is not actually an argument, it’s not even wrong.
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THAT’S TRUE!!! I read The Conventions at lunch, and found that they most certainly do not cover buying, or eating lunch. Or reading. Or finding The Conventions. Those policy wonks sure missed a lot of stuff.
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It’s not really my personal opinion. I would have preferred the original position of the Bush administration, which was later the unanimous decision of the U.S. Court of Appeals, that the Conventions don’t apply to al-Qaeda detainees. But the Supreme Court overruled them, and we have to live with it. I would not argue for a position that the Court already ruled differently on without explaining it.
So, it’s not my own personal opinion that I am citing. It’s the law. I don’t think any of the Supreme Court justices, or any of the judges in the lower courts, or even any of their clerks on these cases, would have agreed with you.
Addendum:
I should add that there were some in the Bush administration who thought the full Conventions should be applied. But they believed it wouldn’t matter to most of the detainees. Colin Powell thought there were advantages to doing this. He had told Bush that, at worst, there might be a handful of Taliban soldiers who could then ask for a tribunal, and there was some chance that those few would then get POW status. But it wouldn’t make any difference at all to most of the detainees. He didn’t even think they would merit getting the tribunal.
I mean as a president that was a distraction from the actual power.
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Of course they don’t. Because they have some sympathies with them.
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Of course. 
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