When Bush and Rumsfeld and Gonzales started shipping Afghani suspects off to Guantánamo and out of the reach of the US legal system, they also decided that these captives were not really soldiers of any army but merely "enemy combatants" (a term newly fabricated for their purposes, though never clearly defined). The Supreme Court has made some effort to reestablish the rule of law, but so far without much changing the reality in Cuba.
Therefore, according to the Bush logic, these "enemy combatants" were also not really POWs and did not enjoy the protections of the Geneva Conventions. At the time, the ACLU and other guardians of constitutional rights warned that this same logic could be turned against captured American soldiers in the future. But the Bush administration dismissed that concern, apparently under the mistaken expectation that no American soldiers would ever be captured—or, if they were, they would be wearing US uniforms and would be protected by US military might, so no enemy would dare strip them of Geneva protections.
Now the Bushites have taken a further step down this dangerous path. While Iraqi captives have been deemed to fall under Geneva (for whatever little good it has done them, in Abu Ghraib and elsewhere), a Pentagon official has now announced that non-Iraqis captured in Iraq will not be so protected. Douglas Jehl and Neil A. Lewis report this disturbing decision in the New York Times:
After raids in recent months that captured hundreds of insurgents in Iraq, the United States has significantly increased the number of prisoners it says are foreign fighters, a group the Bush administration contends are not protected by the Geneva Conventions, American officials said.
A Pentagon official said Friday that the United States was now holding 325 foreign fighters in Iraq, a number that the official said had increased by 140 since Nov. 7, just before the invasion of Falluja. Many of the non-Iraqis were captured in or around that city.
Many of them are suspected of links to Al Qaeda or the related terror networks supporting the insurgency in Iraq, senior Bush administration officials said this week.
Some of the non-Iraqis who were involved in the insurgency there could be transferred out of the country for indefinite detention elsewhere, the officials said, as they have been deemed by the Justice Department not to be entitled to protections of the Geneva Conventions.
Alberto R. Gonzales, the White House counsel, testifying Thursday before the Senate Judiciary Committee on his nomination to become attorney general, noted that the Justice Department had issued a legal opinion last year saying non-Iraqis captured by American forces in Iraq are not entitled to the protections of the Geneva Conventions.
If non-Iraqis captured by Americans do not deserve Geneva proections—and may, in fact, be subject to "rendition" and torture—it would follow logically that any non-Iraqis captured by Iraqis would also be unprotected. Bush and Gonzales may not have considered the fact that American soldiers are non-Iraqis. According to their skewed logic, any American soldiers captured in Iraq (or, in fact, anywhere outside the US) are ineligible for Geneva protections.
The Geneva Conventions were developed to protect the rights of all captured combatants, on both sides. Bush's evisceration of these principles endangers American soldiers as much as it does their enemies.
