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The arguments employed by the opponents of George Bush's plan to establish specific definitions for Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions make one argument over and over again, and rarely get challenged on it. They claim that any redefinition or apparent backsliding on the Geneva Conventions will put our own troops at risk; Colin Powell made the same argument yesterday. However, they fail to explain how the GC has ever protected American troops during wartime:
Colin L. Powell, Mr. Bush’s former secretary of state, sided with the senators, saying in a letter that the president’s plan to redefine the Geneva Conventions would encourage the world to “doubt the moral basis of our fight against terrorism,” and “put our own troops at risk.” ...Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, the senior Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, warned the administration against taking on Mr. McCain, a former prisoner of war.
“They’re trying to reinterpret the Geneva Conventions,’’ Mr. Levin said, “but the best expert on that is somebody who has very personal experience with those who violate Geneva, and that’s Senator McCain.”
Senator McCain is hardly the only American POW who had experience with GC violations, and that's the point. We have yet to fight against a wartime enemy that followed the GC with any consistency at all. The Germans routinely violated it even before Hitler began issuing orders to shoot captured pilots, and the massacre at Malmedy only crystallized what had been consistently brutal treatment at the hands of the Nazis for American prisoners (the Luftwaffe was one notable exception). The Japanese treatment of POWs was nothing short of barbaric, both before and after Bataan. The same is true for the North Koreans and the Chinese in the Korean War, and McCain himself is a routine example of the kind of treatment our men suffered at the hands of the Vietnamese.
In this war, this argument seems particularly despicable. We have been treated to images of broken and tortured bodies of our soldiers on television and the Internet, courtesy of the animals who oppose us in this war. No one suffers under the delusion that captured soldiers will ever return alive, let alone receive Geneva-approved treatment. Our enemy doesn't even fight according to the GC, so why should they treat our soldiers any better than they treat the civilians they target for their attacks?
If Powell and Levin and McCain can name one modern conflict where our enemies gave POWs treatment in accordance with the GC, I'd be glad to post it right here on my blog. Don't expect that kind of an update any time soon.
Congress wants the Bush administration to follow the GC in handling terrorists, and that's a legitimate position to take. If that's what Congress wants, then it had better be prepared to define acceptable and unacceptable practices with more precision than "shocks the conscience". That kind of loose, easily-manipulated legal standard only puts our men and women at risk for all sorts of courtroom mischief and misdirected prosecutions. We can follow the GC while defining what it specifically means into American law; it isn't the Constitution, and other treaties get incorporated into American law all of the time. Hiding behind that nonspecific standard is an abdication of Congressional responsibility, and the argument of reflexive treatment is a canard that these men are using as a red herring to hide that abdication.
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