Willmeister said:
Slippery slope and I'll show you just how;
In other words, if we grant Constitutional priviliges to criminals regardless of whether they follow the law, we take away the main incentive for compliance. And those rules are extraordinarily important. When criminals fail to clearly distinguish themselves from the population, law-abiding citizens invariably are victimized in large numbers. Indeed this is one of the most critical issues in civilization w.r.t. victims.
International law acts on a completely different philosophical basis than domestic law. In domestic law, the State has a monopoly on the use of coercion. Read some social contract theory.
International law, on the other hand, mediates between equals. It is much more like domestic contract law than domestic criminal law.
Trust me. You don't want that at all. Remember all those suspected Taliban prisoners who suffocated in those shipping containers during transport? Since they were acting under US command, the USA would be responsible for each and every death.
I do remember that. The Northern Alliance soldiers who perpetrated that warcrime were
not acting under US command, they were acting under the command of Afghan warlords. The US had something like a dozen special forces on hand in an advisory role during that prisoner handover (and not during the prisoner transport on which so many were killed). We not only had no way of stopping the suffocation, we had no way of knowing about it until after it was over.
We're in no way liable under international law for actions taken by our allies during a war, unless we approved them or had reasonable foreknowledge they would occur, and had the means to prevent them. None of which was the case here.
A signatory to the G.C. who is an occupier is directly responsible for the safety and welfare of the population (or POWs) they have charge over.
Only after they are indeed a
de facto occupier with a reasonable expectation of control over the country. The US never reached that level during the Afghan war, and we certainly weren't in a position to impose law and order at the time of those suffocations.
This is just common sense really. Those with the power have a duty to dispense with it properly; those that don't will be held accountable.
Exactly. It is common sense. You need to have the power to reasonably be held responsible. We did not in Afghanistan. We arguably do now in Iraq (although in certain areas of the country, in particular the so-called "Sunni Triangle", we don't and thus can't be held responsible for civil order there yet).
So, you should be glad the G.C. has been effectively gutted by precedent. Now, however, all nations will refer to their POWs as 'enemy combatants'.
Again, the Conventions are quite specific about what steps armies must take to have their soldiers treated as lawful combatants with the protections accorded them in the G.C. The Taliban/Al Qaeda fighters in Afghanistan did not meet those qualifications. Again, we can extend G.C. protections to them out of the goodness of our hearts--and IMO we should have--but there's abosolutely no obligation to do so.
Incidentally, many of the Iraqi soldiers (particularly the Saddam Fedeyeen) violated the Conventions, but I'm fairly certain we're according them G.C. protections anyways. I'm not sure what we're doing about the non-Iraqi Arabs who were bused in to be paramilitaries.
