Re: Legal status of prisoners.

["Justin Schwartz" <jkschw@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

> Are there any lawyers on Pen-L who know anything about the term "unlawful
> combatants"?

I think it is something made up so that the prisoners do not have to be
subject to the Geneva Convention.

> If they were taken prisoners in the war against terrorism, how is it they
> are not prisoners of war? I guess it is because as someone put it: Grammar
> is the first casualty of war and you really cannot have a war against an
> abstract noun such as "terrorism". THe Bush spin doctors make words up to
> mean whatever suits them it seems.

Quite.

>     Surely civil rights experts should be crying out against what the US
> is
> doing. The Red Cross is going to be allowed to visit but on US terms of
> course. What of family of these detainees, will they ever be informed about
> the detainees? It seems that the US is now in
> the disappeared business whisking people off to deal with as they please
> for
> the most part.

It's very scary. Did you hear Rumsfeld explain that foreigners are not
entitled to constitutional rights? Legal nonsense, but "little careI for the
law."

jks

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