The Geneva Conventions & The War on Terror

The United States helped write the Geneva Conventions after World War II, preventing torture, humiliation, and degradation of prisoners in the wake of some of the horrors seen in that struggle. The Geneva Conventions are a set of international laws that protect human dignity in war time. They are a standard of behavior for combatants, and they are quite thorough in their provisions. The United States had signed them and agreed to them in 1949, and had primarily upheld them ever since. It is crucial that the United States continue to uphold them, because they also help ensure that American troops will be treated according to that same standard when captured. Prior to the Geneva Conventions, the United States troops had adhered to similar or even higher standards. Many people see this kind of protection of human dignity as an essential American value.

The Geneva Conventions became an issue when the War in Afghanistan started. When the US started acquiring captives, they wanted to know how to categorize them. John Yoo's position on the issue was that the Geneva Conventions should not apply to the people captured in this war, because Al Qaeda had not signed the Geneva Conventions or upheld any standards of humane warfare. Early in 2002, Bush decided that he agreed with Yoo and the Justice Department, and Yoo and other lawyers set about to create a legal loophole by which the Conventions could be ignored. They made the decision to treat the detainees and prisoners not as prisoners of war who were protected by the Conventions, but as unlawful combatants, who did not have any rights. The importance of intelligence in this new kind of covert war overrode longstanding codes of conduct so that the United States would be able to use inhumane methods to extract information from prisoners.