No! Wait! He is British? :smack:
That is a war crime and those responsible would be guilty under US and International law. Civilised nations have long been past the point where this was acceptable.
Actually I should have said a officer in the British Army. Tim Collins is from Nortern Ireland born in Belfast.
No, no, a thousand times NO!
This is what really ticks me off about the left these days. You love invoking laws and rules which don’t exist. The people captured are not Prisoners of War, they are rebels and guerrilas and are explicitly not covered by, say, the Geneva COnvention. In fact, they ply their trade by deliberately violating the Geneva Convention while expecting we will still grant them the benefit of the doubt. Hence, we can legally kill them on the spot, and we don’t’ have to take or accept surrender.
Now, I don’t particualrly want to do that.
But then on the other hand they committed no crime. There’s nothing illegal about their actions, apart from it being High Treason to a country they don’t recognize and whose authority over them is suspect (Iraq between the invasion and subsequent democratic restoration).
And you know all this how, exactly?
This is America. The law provides that persons accused of offenses are presumed innocent until proven guilty. Certainly some of them are likely guilty as hell of terroristic offenses against international law, and presumably the laws of Afghanistan as well. In a few cases, we have good evidence that they were people inconvenient to informers and warlords, turned over to us for a bounty, who are likely guilty of nothing more than black market trading, if that.
But the point is, we don’t know until and unless they’re tried. Actual POWs, yes, hold them for trial when the war is over if that seems appropriate. There’s precedent for that. But at minimum, give them a fair trial with opportunty to present a defense. To go all Godwin on you, we did that for the Nazis, for Pete’s sake. (And acquitted three people at Nuremburg who were proven not to have committed war crimes, while convicting twenty-odd others.)
To quote the old Western sheriff, “They deserve a fair trial, and if guilty, a first-class hangin’.”
I disagree with you on the law, (oddly enough, the geneva convention isn’t the only material on the law of war). But that’s not my point.
You can talk all you want who the people are we’re fighting. We can talk about what it says about them to be terrorists.
But I know EXACTLY what executing people who surrender says about us, and how it’ll be viewed among civilized nations (see, e.g. the eloquent speech of Lt-Col. Collins above).
If you think that’s who we are, what gives us the moral authority to go after the bad guys?
And we should give them the benefit of the doubt. That’s because we’re better than them, and because not doing so says nothing about them, and a hell of a lot about us.
And if you’re saying that what they (i.e. people who haven’t actually attacked us directly) did isn’t illegal, then what on earth gives us the authority to shoot them?
Also, just so I’m clear… according to your theory, would it be a war crime if a terrorist murdered our soldiers after they surrendered? If the rules don’t apply to us, why do they apply to them?
We can’t simply detain them forever, POWs or not. The principle of habeus corpus goes back nearly eight hundred years to the Magna Carta. Do we want our country to be better or worse than England under King John?
Interesting: Obama’s AG nominee thinks Gitmo detainees are not POWs and do not qualify for Geneva convention treatment (though obviously we may chose to give them such if we want).
Of course, that was 2002, this is 2008, so we’ll see.
I’m not sure I disagree, in principle, that at then end of the day, many of the prisoners in GITMO are probably not POWs as defined by the geneva convention.
-That doesn’t mean the geneva convention is inapplicable-we should use it to define what a POW is, who gets that status. That includes the obligation of a hearing when a prisoner contends they are entitled to POW status.
Many of the people in gitmo aren’t what we’d think of as “traditional” prisoners of war at all. Examples:
Not captured on the battlefield. Not a uniformed, easily identifiable member of an army or other belligerent organization. Not actively in combat with U.S. troops.
The question with those people isn’t can we hold them under Geneva-it’s can we hold them at all, and if so, what do we need to prove.
They probably deserve a writ of habeas corpus.
Then there’s the other type of prisoner
For them, the geneva convention probably applies to the extent that it mandates a hearing to determine if they are or are not entitled to POW status.
At the end of the day, they may be unlawful combatants-on the ground, attacking US troops, not in compliance with laws of war.
They might be prisoners of war.
There’s a third issue (Rarely reached in earlier wars)-there, we usually had no question that someone was an enemy soldier–caught on the battlefield, surrendered, wore a uniform, etc, etc.
Some of the “soldiers” in gitmo were picked up by bounty hunters, and claim they had nothing to do with the war. Given the facts, this is probably a live issue, rather than just an academic defense-we did offer large bounties for taliban/AQ fighters in afghanistan. Surprisingly enough, many people were turned over. Are they actually fighters? ask the person trying to collect the bounty, who had a big financial interest in us deciding so.
Not to say many are not bad guys-just that it’s not anywhere near as clear-cut as previous captures. Hence, there is probably a practical need for a hearing beyond that required by geneva, to determine if these people are even enemy fighters, or just wrong/place/wrong time.
IANAL, all examples wikied in a rush, and picked essentially at random-- so they are probably nowhere near perfect-they’re most valuable to show the basic principle than anything else.