John Doe wrote:
Rand Simberg wrote:
No, they wouldn't. They're unlawful combatants. And they are being
treated according to Geneva despite that.

This from a citizen of the USA whose constitution grants the right to
all citizens to bear arms to defend their country.

Sorry folks, there are no "unlawful combattants".

Unfortunately, this is a naive and ignorant viewpoint.

Spies and Saboteurs have always been excluded from
the prisoner of war treaties.

No matter how
justified the military intervention in Afghanistan was, Afghans had full
rights to defend their country against an invading military force.

Of course. And a number of reasonable people have held that the
Taliban should be treated as prisoners of war. And in general they
have been. It's a defensible argument that the Afghan civil war
isn't over and that the Taliban prisoners should still be held for
a while longer, but they should be treated as POWs.

Al Qaeda are not lawful combatants: they are not a national or
territorial organization, they don't bear arms or uniforms as
required under the Geneva convention, their method of waging warfare
is to sabotage rather than fight openly. True members of Al Qaeda
are clearly not lawful combatants. They are saboteurs.

There are some people whose allegiance, some mixture of Taliban and
Al Qaeda, is somewhat debatable. Some of those have been held in
Guantanamo.

I don't entirely agree with the classifications in use and the
lack of clarity of the grey Taliban lawful / Al Qaeda unlawful
dividing line. But there clearly is a line, and there clearly
are a number of people who are on the unlawful side of it,
under any of the treaty regimes or any state's interpretation
of international law.

Fundamentally, this is the international lawyers and diplomats
fault for not looking ahead enough.

The whole international law regime wasn't meant to deal with
transnational or independent terrorist organizations.
It was clear decades ago that there were such organizations
that existed and that applying the existing international
law to them was problematic. All the diplomats basically
turned their back on the problem.

How the current regime of international law is being bent
to deal with it, rather than have some new international
law regime put in place, is an ugly sight.

And the Bush administration certainly hasn't been nearly as
open about defining what they're doing as they should, nor
have they done a near enough good job on separating Taliban
from Al Qaeda.

But they're operating in a functional area of legal ambiguity
that exists because the diplomats in the 70s and 80s chose
to leave it ambiguous.

None of the diplomats *now* want to touch it, because in general
nobody has put forwards credible alternative ideas on how to deal
with the problems. The lack of progressive intellectual analysis
and debate on practical better regimes has been a loudly heard
vaccum in the debates.

So do you have any actual ideas for how to improve the international
law to deal with these issues? Or are you just blowing anti-American
smoke around out of frustration?


-george william herbert