re: #369 brookly red

no, but when you face an enemy that actually targets civilians (re:9/11) what do the Geneva Conventions (and thank you for knowing that there was more than one) have to do with anything… did Atta wear a uniform? Did the Christmas bomber? Hows about this last round of mail bombs? Geneva Conventions material?

That makes our situation even more complicated. Our single biggest problem in this conflict is that we’re being targeted by a nonprofit organization with multiple spin-offs, as well as fighting in two destabilized nations with multiple players.

It also makes the slope far more slippery. People on this site were calling for the underwear bomber to be treated a military operative rather than a criminal, and calling the Obama administration weak for allowing terrorists to be tried in civil courts. So we really have a problem at times, figuring out whether we’re dealing with criminals, enemy combatants, or illegal enemy combatants. And we tend to pick and choose.

But we also do not torture criminals, according to the US legal code and considerable long-standing tradition in Anglo-American practice. This is a sort of new situation, but not so new that we need to throw out all previously existing law and moral expectations.