Obama’s Attorney General: Terrorists Not Protected by Geneva Convention
by Bill Levinson
The Democrats have bleated for years about the detention of illegal combatants at Guantanamo, while the Left and the “international community” have demanded that captured terrorists be treated as prisoners of war. We read in the November 22-23 Wall Street Journal (page A13) that Barack Obama’s selected Attorney General, Eric Holder, agrees with us that terrorists are not uniformed combatants who are entitled to the protections of the Geneva Convention. Per an interview on CNN in January 2002,
- One of the things we clearly want to do with these prisoners is to have an ability to interrogate them and find out what their future plans might be, where other cells are located; under the Geneva Convention that you are really limited in the amount of information that you can elicit from people.
It seems to me that given the way in which they have conducted themselves, however, that they are not, in fact, people entitled to the protection of the Geneva Convention. They are not prisoners of war. If, for instance, Mohammed Atta had survived the attack on the World Trade Center, would we now be calling him a prisoner of war? I think not. Should Zacarias Moussaoui be called a prisoner of war? Again, I think not.
I suggest we use sarin or VX gas on them – the kind that causes convulsions so severe it snaps bones likes twigs. Now that’s my idea of a dance party – 4 or 5 hundred thousand militant Islamist sand Nazis doing that horizontal “break” dance all in one shot. I bet it would feel like a stampede.
Re: #1
My only problems with the “atrocities” at Abu Ghraib are as follows:
(1) Some of the prisoners who were abused were probably innocent, and there is no excuse for punishing the innocent along with the guilty.
(2) The guilty ones (terrorists) deserved whatever they got. Even so, members of the U.S. Armed Forces should not have been the ones to give it to them, because abuse of prisoners–even terrorists–is inconsistent with the discipline of any professional army.
As for the guilty ones, though, I do not care what was done to them. As recently as the Second World War, they would have been put up against the nearest wall and shot. Germans who were captured in American uniforms were executed on the spot, and I am not sure their captors even bothered with any kind of trial. During the First World War, England gave spies “short shrift,” which was soon defined as “putting someone between a wall and a firing squad, and giving the order to shoot.” During the 19th century, incidentally, those pirates off Somalia would have been hanged from the nearest yardarm after a drumhead court martial to prove that they were, in fact, pirates.