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Originally Posted by Urbane Guerrilla
Let's not confuse the civil rights of American citizens with the Geneva protections of prisoners of war, which is what these fellows are de facto. The Geneva Conventions protections are also what they are getting.
What SCOTUS did was, well, really bending over backwards. I'm not sure I see the need, myself. Looks like some Justices see it my way too.
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GWB’s war on terror has no defined victory parameters so it is for all intents and purposes a perpetual war. Under the Geneva Convention being a POW is not supposed to be a life sentence.
Furthermore, the Geneva Convention requires that POWs be encamped in a region that resembles the climate of the battlefield where they were captured. I doubt tropical Cuba is all that similar to Afghanistan.
And the Geneva Convention requires any country that holds POWs to give them the same pay that they holding country pays its own military personnel of the same rank. Is the U.S. paying salaries to anyone it is holding at Gitmo?
And the Geneva Convention prohibits torture, so any act of torture on the part of the U.S. or by any other country at the behest of the U.S. violates the Geneva Convention.
And under the Geneva Convention POWs are not required to give anything but their name, rank and serial number. They are not supposed to be interrogated for intelligence purposes. If the people we have locked up at Gitmo are really POWs, then we have no right to interrogate them about past, present or future terrorist operations.