We are Fighting a War but the Prisoners We Take are Not Prisoners of War?

Judicial branch? What judicial branch?

This vernacular frustrates in the extreme. "The procedures must be fair," Gonzalez said to the Senators, "but also must reflect that we are still at war and that our men and women on the front lines operate in a war zone, not in the controlled environment of an F.B.I. forensics lab."

If we are at war then why are these men who are imprisoned in Guantanamo not prisoners of war? Because it is a different kind of war... and they go on and on and you are left behind at the question: what does all of this have to do with the rights of prisoners? What about this war being different mandates that we must deny these prisoners due process?

They are criminals or they are prisoners of war. It has to be one or the other. Either way they are due their rights. These men are being treated as if guilty until proven innocent-without being given the means for the latter. It is thoroughly insane.You cannot just create a new definition of criminal--in this case "unlawful combatants"--to slip between the cracks and give yourself ultimate power over these men. The Bush Administration is to be trusted to care properly for these prisoners? No wonder they are committing suicide. We came up with the Geneva Convention and our due process laws for a reason, and that reason is acknowledgement that not all men being tried are guilty and that even the guilty deserve to get sentenced and on with their punishment as soon as possible.

If you are going to lock them up that means you have evidence, right? Enough to prosecute? Then why not do so? Why leave them on some base to rot....

They have proven with their lack of concern over bin Laden that they are after nation states that support terrorists more than non nation state organizations. This is of course a huge tactical error. The organizations that operate independant of any one nation state simply relocate out of the conflict zone and in fact cases seem to flourish in the targeted areas. Maybe he would have more of an excuse for treating our POWs as something else if he was fighting this war in any non conventional manner, but he is not. He is saying this is a new war, then fighting the war like any other against nation states and not terrorist organizations, then when it comes to the rights of prisoners, he refers to his earlier misleading statements about how this is a "new kind of war that must be fought differently."

But the only tangible difference so far seems to be in how they treat those captured in the process. Does a suspected terrorist deserve fewer rights than known members of the Vietcong did when we fought Vietnam? Of course not. The Vietcong employed terrorist tactics all the time but we still gave them their rights. Why? Because that is one of the ways in which we were proud to be better than them. So a nation of terrorists in power deserve rights but those suspected of being in a terrorist agency have none? This is all the more damning because the former is a certaintly while the latter is something than in many cases is not even proven at the point when the prisoners are denied their due process.

But you know by now, don't you? They have no interest in giving these strangers from afar due process. They have no interest in being fair to them at all. They have taken advantage of semantics in terms of the Geneva Convention and manipulated them to avoid a responsibility they should embrace as readily as they did the war that preceded it. Their minds are obviously more focused on conquest than maintaining any sort of moral or ethical standard with regards to those caught along the way. The problem is they do not seem to see why they should treat them fairly. I really do think that sort of empathy is beyond these people, and that is one of the things about this Administration that will always stay with me--their inhumanity.

This administration invokes the word "War" to get an emotional reaction out of people-a currency for them to cash in on-but they do not want to accept the responsibility that comes with it. They have failed humanity yet again, but at this point, I've lost count. Bottom line: at least one of those people they took is innocent. We should do everything we can to get that person free and along their way. "I would rather see a thousand guilty men go free than one innocent man imprisoned," Thomas Jefferson. To look at Bush's policies, he seems to believe the exact opposite.