The Geneva Convention - Lost and Found

Read this article and this one by Andrew McCarthy of NRO, who, along with HumanEvents.com, is "leading the Conservative movement since 1944". After you finish the article, take a look at Andrew Sullivan's critique here. It is followed by John Cole here. As impossible as it is to believe, the Republican pundits are now invoking the suddenly re-discovered Geneva Convention. This is the same Geneva Convention that was "quaint" when mentioned in regards to the US torture program. In trying to understand this seemingly ridiculous contradiction, this is what I think I have found: 1. Detainees held by US forces are not covered by the Geneva Convention because they are not "regular" troops under a recognized State government that has signed the Convention. 2. British prisoners held by Iran are covered because they are regulars in custody of a signing government. this information comes, in part, from articles like this one on O'Reilly and this NRO article by Jonah: If you sign a contract with your neighbor agreeing that neither of you will plant stinky ginkgo trees on your property, that contract is binding on you and your neighbor. It's not binding for the guy who lives across the street. Well, Osama bin Laden lives across the street. He lives outside our neighborhood, our community, our laws. He lives outside all of the rules of civilization, at war and peace. Every day, he violates the Geneva Convention before he has his second bowl of muesli. He blows up passenger trains and hijacks civilian aircraft. His henchmen don't wear uniforms, and they don't abide by any of the rules governing professional armies. "rules governing professional armies"? You mean like the Torture Act and the Uniform Code of Military Justice? John Ashcroft's 2004 testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee is also telling: "The only people who are accorded the protections of the Geneva Convention are number one, according to the convention itself, those nations that are high contracting parties to the Convention. Al Quida is not a high contracting party to the Geneva Convention. It repudiates the rules of war. It operates against civilians. It doesn't wear uniforms. And it has never sought to be a high contracting party. The Geneva Conventions do not apply as it relates to Al Quida and they are not intended to apply." This does not explain this report of Iranian prisoners captured and held by US forces in January. The story is not unique to this article - it is corroborated here. These prisoners should be covered by statement 2 above (Iran is a signer, as are we), but yet they are being held in an undisclosed location - but I'm sure they haven't been subject to any "coercive interrogation techniques". As the above article suggests, perhaps there is a prisoner exchange that will occur? The hair-splitting and justifying is horribly tedious - it is obvious to any semi-sentient human being that the application of the rules of prisoner treatment should not be governed by what type of uniform the prisoner wears. All people deserve equal treatment, regardless of treaty loopholes and legal machinations. Simple human decency requires what the treaty does not - that people in our custody are treated properly. Some people, however, do not want this obvious truth to surface. Enter, the propaganda machine. Around and around we go...