War on Terror – An Internal Front

#7 what i mean is there should be no shades of gray. It should all be black.

#6, do you really support no-rules warfare? It`s not very clear because you seem to think there should still be war crimes.

#5 delhiwala, i agree with you that there should be no rules of war, but for different reasons. The rules sanitize and render war making acceptable. It should not be so. Once upon a time, the armies faced each other in a battle field and fought each other from dawn to dusk and then retired for the evening. We don`t have wars like that any more. There are no battle fields - entire regions are battle fields, enemies don`t face each other - one side drops bombs from unmanned aerial vehicles and shoots missiles and the other sides plants bombs where civilians congregate. War is no gentlemen`s game any more. The reason for having rules is to protect one`s own soldiers and shield them from torture and culpability. Any soldier caught should be indictable of war crimes and you`ll see professional armies becoming outmoded.

I dont think there should be any rules allowed in war.

Without getting into who is right or wrong. Enemy combatants(as per my President) follow no rules, they behead US-Soldiers, and use whatever means to fight us. When they get captured they cannot ask for any rights.
If Saudi Arabia or any other middle Eastern country had American prisoners vice-versa, they probably would have been stoned to death on day-one.

Liske Lathee Uskee Bhaince, this is the age old, time trusted logic that works.

Nobody showed any mercy to my Mom`s family in Pakistan in 1947........They could have simply imprisoned them or taken there property or send them to UN. No, they were butchered by probably parents of this guy or other Pakistanis...What was their fault????

Zeemax

I am pretty sure that a panel of Pakistani military`s legal advisors is among the Bush regimes legal advisors. These legal experts are master at mangling Pakistani Constitution and get the meanings out of its clauses that no human being in his right mind would ever accept to be true. Probably, one of their underlying assumptions is that who among 140 million chutyas would bother read a constitution written in English, and even if one such chutya exists then who cares. This has been exactly the startegy of US government for the past 5 years.

Anyway, Geneva Convention does address the isssue of resistance fighters who do not have ``suits` and ``boot``. The article 64 of GC covers this aspect. Here it is:

ARTICLE 64

The penal laws of the occupied territory shall remain in force, with the exception that they may be repealed or suspended by the Occupying Power in cases where they constitute a threat to its security or an obstacle to the application of the present Convention. Subject to the latter consideration and to the necessity for ensuring the effective administration of justice, the tribunals of the occupied territory shall continue to function in respect of all offences covered by the said laws.

The Occupying Power may, however, subject the population of the occupied territory to provisions which are essential to enable the Occupying Power to fulfil its obligations under the present Convention, to maintain the orderly government of the territory, and to ensure the security of the Occupying Power, of the members and property of the occupying forces or administration, and likewise of the establishments and lines of communication used by them.

I wish to add the following at the end of the third paragraph``

``And the very reason the Geneva Convention came into existence was to prevent combatants from applying Law of Reciprocity to each other, which in the conditions of war simply translates into the law of the jungle.``

#1 by Urstruly

Thanks for an excellent analysis. However, according to the americans, an army needs to be dressed in uniforms and boots to qualify for treatment under the geneva conventions. That kind of war is now a thing of the past.

The very word ``war`` in the phrase `war on terror` suggest that the combatants are POWs and hence subject to Geneva convention.

But the core of the dilemma does not lie in the word ``war`` but in the word ``terrorism``. If US government tries to push a legal element to this conflict then there is no other option but to define the word ``terrorism`` first. Because every court in the world uses a glossary of terms to define an (criminal) act and the label to identify the perpetrator of that act.

So if the word ``terrorism`` is defined as ``an act of war`` (as it is being implied for the past 5 years) then it begs the question whether the destruction of (innocent) human life (I believe that no one is innocent in a war) and property by US army elsewhere also falls into the category of terrorism or not? Because in legal terms the intent and action of a terrorist bombing an office building, for example, and US or Israeli planes bombing a TV station in Lebanon has no difference. So if Terrorism is an act of war then it is not governed by the laws of justice but it is the laws of Reciprocity that reign supreme. Under laws of reciprocity there is no difference if Americans torture their prisoners in Abu-Gharaib and Guantanomo and kill them in the process and other party behead American soldiers and citizens when captive.

But if ``terrorism`` is defined as an act of political expression against an enemy that is overwhelmingly stronger, then Geneva Convention protects this right of human beings and terms it as ``resistance``. According to this convention then all resistance fighters, regardless of being stateless or not, must be accorded treatment under the convention. This is something that Americans can never ever do because that would be an addmission of the existence of a ``political problem``. In that case Israel would not be able to say that ``our soldiers were kidnapped by terrorists`` but it will be forced to admit that ``our soldiers were taken POWs by the enemies``. Americans, West and Israel spend billions of dollars every year on their propaganda machinery to use semantics to dodge an ordinary person`s attention from that ``political problem`` and divert it to a bad religion whose ``mentally deranged adherents are out there to wipe off civilization from the globe``. There is too much politically on stake here.