Biff Bang POW
For some time now, Damian Penny and his readers have been engaged in a lively debate about Camp X-ray and whether the prisoners there are POWs as defined by the Geneva Convention. I've been following it, and it's certainly worth reading. Article 4 of the GC does appear to offer some basis for concluding that these al Qaeda fighters are "unlawful combatants," but this begs the question in a way, since the al Qaeda organization and its Taleban hosts were illegitimate entities from the get-go. Nonetheless they exist, and will remain a problem as long as this is the case; they present security dangers that must be addressed.
Megan McArdle gets to the heart of the matter when she writes, in her blog and in a letter which Damian quotes:
the Taliban isn't a signatory to the Geneva Convention. The Convention isn't some sort of pledge that a nation takes to behave well; it's a treaty, and is applicable only to member nations. So whether or not the Taliban is a valid national government, and whether or not the prisoners were dressed appropriately or used the correct protocol to surrender, they still aren't entitled to its protections, any more than they are entitled to sue for tariff relief under the WTO. While I personally believe that we should treat the prisoners at Guantanamo with the minimum civilities we would hope to receive if the shoe were on the other foot, they have no legal entitlement to this treatment.
(I, like Damian, find it a bit odd that there hasn't been a more forceful presentation of the case both by the US and by the critics: everything I have read has been short on specifics. And if experts on international law have formed a consensus on the question, they haven't yet made it in Google-able form, as far as I can tell. But as I understand it as a legal rather than as a publicity matter, it's really up to the Red Cross and the US government, rather than the EU or Amnesty International or the BBC, to sort these things out.)
Of course the prisoners should be treated humanely, and I'm sure the Red Cross is doing it's job to ensure that they are. If inappropriate measures are being taken, they should be exposed and halted. To focus so assiduously on the Geneva Convention, however, is to substitute legalism for rational thought. There were those who said that the US "could not" go to war against the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks: you can only declare war on a state, not an abstraction like terrorism, they said. Despite the attempt to define the war out of existence, though, the war ended up occurring anyway: an attack on the US had to be challenged, and anyone who thought that this kind of legalistic reasoning could prevent such a response was not an inhabitant of reality. (This is leaving aside the question of whether this reasoning is valid. I don't think it is, but valid or not, it is, in the event, irrelevant.)
This inevitable conflict has in turn inevitably resulted in al Qaeda prisoners in US custody. They have theoretically "surrendered," but past experience has shown what these people are capable of: commandeering and crashing planes by means of ordinary household objects, rigging themselves up as human bombs in hospital beds, turning on captors with snatched weapons, requesting that emissaries be sent to negotiate surrender and shooting them when they arrive, etc. And these particular prisoners have made specific threats to this effect since their capture. Of course they are going to subject them to the highest level of security when transporting them and housing them. Wouldn't you? I have no idea whether the GC could be read as prohibiting the hooding, chaining, sedating, caging, illuminating, etc. of such people, but it still seems like a pretty good idea. (And of course, they're being treated better than the Taleban treated homosexuals, or "suspected Christians;" they are by and large probably in better shape in Camp X-ray than they would be hiding in some bin Laden cave, eating insects instead of bagels; and they are certainly better off in Camp X-ray than they would be if they had been allowed to detonate and incinerate themselves along with any bystanders in one of their trademark suicide attacks. I know that's also beside the point, but some perspective is in order.)
International agreements have their value, but so does common sense. It's interesting that the European governments and press have made so much of the GC-angle. Such a legalistic obsession with treaties, agreements, pacts, and the like to the neglect of addressing strategic realities was arguably one of the failings of the European Powers that led to the Second World War.
If I'm not mistaken, Iraq is one of the 170-odd signatories to the Geneva Convention, which banned the development, production, and deployment of biological weapons in 1972. I don't know about you, but somehow, that doesn't make me feel any safer. The Geneva Convention afforded precious little protection to the Kurds, as I recall.
Posted by Dr. Frank at January 20, 2002 10:10 PM | TrackBack