[size=4]The Jackals Are Wrong[/size=4]
By Charles Krauthammer
Friday, January 25, 2002; Page A25
Guantanamo is hopping and the jackals are howling. Sweden, Germany, Switzerland, the Netherlands -- stalwart allies who held America's coat during the war in Afghanistan -- are complaining that the Guantanamo prisoners are not accorded POW rights under the Geneva Convention.
Amnesty International is shocked that we are using shackles. The U.N. high commissioner for human rights, Mary Robinson, is disturbed that the United States might be violating the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. (Yes, the same Mary Robinson who, in the name of famine relief, made the idiotic demand for a cessation of U.S. bombing five days after it began -- a demand that would have resulted in untold Afghan deaths in a famine now ended by the American victory.) The British tabloids are apoplectic, achieving full-throated silliness when the Mail on Sunday managed an allusion to slavery: "Each man is handcuffed and wears leg irons, a term that survives from slave-trading days."
Thanks for the etymology. No thanks for the advice. We should treat these complaints with the contempt they deserve.
The critical issue in the treatment of these captured fighters is whether, under international law, they are prisoners of war or "unlawful combatants."
An Iraqi soldier captured in Kuwait is a prisoner of war entitled to the protections of the Geneva Convention. An al Qaeda fighter captured anywhere is not. By self-definition, al Qaeda members are unlawful combatants, meaning people who fight outside the recognized rules of war.
Among the distinguishing characteristics of unlawful combatants are these: They deliberately attack civilians, and they deliberately infiltrate among civilians by not wearing an insignia or uniform.
Al Qaeda openly practices both. In 1996, Osama bin Laden issued "A Declaration of War Against the Americans." Note: not "against the United States." Unlike, say, Nazi Germany and Japan, al Qaeda declared war not on the state but on the people. In 1998, bin Laden declared that "to kill the Americans and their allies -- civilians and military -- is an individual duty for every Muslim."
Osama said it. And on Sept. 11, al Qaeda did it. And they did it the way terrorists do: out of uniform, by means of infiltration and concealment.
You join al Qaeda, you join an outlaw army. You explicitly violate -- and thus forfeit the protection of -- the Geneva Convention. Indeed, denying such murderers POW rights vindicates the Geneva Convention and encourages others to adhere to it, by reserving its protections for those who observe its strictures. (I am willing to concede that low-level Taliban fighters -- if there are any at Guantanamo -- might be entitled to more protection. Senior Taliban, however, having expressly joined their cause to al Qaeda's, should share in its fate.)
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