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 fairly 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.

UPDATE: I see via Technorati that a number of bloggers haven't bothered to read past my post title. I'm not advocating torture, as more than one of them stated. I'm saying that Congress had better define exactly what interrogation techniques will violate Common Article 3 if it wants to hold the military and the CIA to that standard in their efforts to glean intel from captured terrorists. Their failure to define that beyond the "shocks the conscience" language is a clear abdication of their responsibilities. They rightly demanded their prerogative in exercising checks on the executive branch, and now they have to do so responsibly.

I'm not arguing for torture anywhere in this post; I'm pointing out the intellectual vacuity of claiming that a legal definition of interrogator responsibilities within Article 3 will put our troops at any more risk than they face now, or that they faced in the last 70 years of warfare. Intellectual vacuity appears contagious.

Trackback Pings

TrackBack URL for this entry is

Listed below are links to weblogs that reference Since When Has Geneva Protected Our Troops?:

» The Horror of It from what if?
Via Instapundit and PowerLine, an update on America's gulag.Detainees are entitled to a full eight hours sleep and can't be woken up for interrogations. They enjoy three meals and five prayers per day, without interruption. They are entitled to a [Read More]

Tracked on September 15, 2006 8:41 AM

» Liberalism and Aggression from ShrinkWrapped
In today's New York Sun, R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr., with tongue lightly implanted in cheek, wonders about the source of liberals' discontent with the world in Alone At the Heart Of Liberalism. He points out that liberal principles are exactly [Read More]

Tracked on September 15, 2006 9:53 AM

» Liberalism and Aggression from ShrinkWrapped
In today's New York Sun, R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr., with tongue lightly implanted in cheek, wonders about the source of liberals' discontent with the world in Alone At the Heart Of Liberalism. He points out that liberal principles are exactly [Read More]

Tracked on September 15, 2006 9:58 AM

» Liberalism and Aggression from ShrinkWrapped
In today's New York Sun, R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr., with tongue lightly implanted in cheek, wonders about the source of liberals' discontent with the world in Alone At the Heart Of Liberalism. He points out that liberal principles are exactly [Read More]

Tracked on September 15, 2006 10:00 AM

» Talk about the Geneva Conventions from Necessary Roughness
I was going to post about Colin Powell’s charge that President Bush is seeking to reinterpret Article III of the Geneva Conventions in the Military Commissions Act of 2006 now working its way through the house. The legislation is very hard to rea... [Read More]

Tracked on September 15, 2006 10:02 AM

» Web Reconnaissance for 09/15/2006 from The Thunder Run
A short recon of what’s out there that might draw your attention. [Read More]

Tracked on September 15, 2006 12:07 PM

» http://www.texasrainmaker.com/2006/09/15/1364/ from Texas Rainmaker
Captain Ed asks, “Since when has Geneva protected our troops?” He addresses the fallacy of the argument made by some regarding our need to apply Geneva Convention standards to treatement of terrorists and how, if we don’t, it will so... [Read More]

Tracked on September 15, 2006 12:13 PM

» Bill's Bites -- 2006.09.15 from Old War Dogs
The webmaster's blog-within-a-blog. Continuously updated and bumped, newest items at the top. Please click here to learn more about The Phoenix Project, then click here to see a selection of Old War Dogs merchandise. All sales proceeds go to support [Read More]

Tracked on September 15, 2006 2:25 PM

» If we want to win this war, this type of thinking must stop from Capitalism Matters!
To continue to insist that the United States has a greater moral obligation to treat caputed terrorists with kid gloves than it does to agressively protect Americans from the destruction that these terrorists have vowed to cause is absolute lunacy. The... [Read More]

Tracked on September 15, 2006 9:17 PM