John Garcia wrote: > If Al Queda does not follow the Geneva Convention, if it does not adhere > to the laws of armed conflict, why should its members be accorded the > Convention's protections?
Because _we do_ follow the Geneva Convention. They aren't civilized so we don't have to treat them in a civilized manner? Please note that I'm not contending that there have been rights violations, only that as a matter of principal we should adhere to the moral high ground despite the despicable acts that have been committed against us. Doug If we do follow the Geneva Convention, then we _don't_ accord them the protections, because part of the convention is that only signatory powers and those who abide by the Conventions get the protection of the Convention (this is why the US is protected and the North Vietnamese were full of it - although it is not a signatory, it does in fact abide by the Conventions and considers itself legally bound to do so, to the extent that they are incorporated into military law). There is no legal or moral obligation to treat them according to the (very) strict protocols of the Convention. Now, because we are civilized there are things we won't do. We will give them trials, and we won't torture them, and so on. But if it is convenient to us to shackle them in an airplane because they are threats to the guards and pilots then I have no problem with doing so. There is no legal problem with us doing so. And there is not a moral problem with us doing so. Indeed, I would argue that doing _otherwise_ is morally problematic, for unnecessarily risking the lives of the (innocent) Americans who are protecting civilization by fighting Al Qaeda is an immoral act. It's so easy for critics (who, after all, have no stake in what's happening) to conveniently forget that there are _other_ moral duties than the protection of captured terrorists. One of them is the moral duty to not spend the blood of your _own_ soldiers needlessly. Morality, oddly enough, runs both ways. If people criticize us for something as marginal as shackling members of Al Qaeda captured in Afghanistan - so what? It's clear to any person with eyes to see it that there are lots of people in Europe and the rest of the world who have no interest whatsoever in the justice or injustice of anything the US or Israel does - they seek only to criticize to satisfy some internal compulsions that we cannot, and should not, take seriously or allow to constrain our actions. As Jeroen (unintentionally) and Dan (intentionally) have shown, the shackling would be legitimate under the conventions even if Al Qaeda members _were_ protected, which they, again, are not. I, for one, don't buy the school of interpretation that seems to say that both law and morality must always be interpreted in the manner that makes protecting the United States maximally difficult. If the law says that we can do things, and it is necessary (or even useful) to do those things, and it is not obviously immoral to reasonable people to do those things, then why is it necessary to stretch readings of the law and morality beyond all recognition to make them say that we _cannot_ do those things? We can, in my opinion, maintain the moral high ground while effectively fighting terrorism, because part of morality is that you act differently towards people in different moral positions. Gautam
