Did the Geneva Conventions, when ratified, really change how America treated prisoners of war?
The main right-wing argument claiming that the Geneva Conventions don't apply to terrorists, suggests that before they were enacted, that the American government had no qualms about executions, torture, or lifetime imprisonments.
I had always believed that those treaties were signed mainly to keep other nations to our own standards, not something forced upon us by more-civilized nations. With those conventions, we were pledging to treat their captured troops as well as we would treat any other prisoner in our country.
Is this correct, or am I missing an important aspect of our history?
This is beyond the fact that any treaty is national law, once ratified by Congress. It's a much more basic issue.
Torture, as far as I understand, is currently not legal for use against those accused of robbery, or even rape or murder, even if they are in this country illegally. And Americans outside the country can still be prosecuted here for crimes committed abroad.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not naive enough to think that people are happy in our prisons and jails, but hasn't there historically been legal standards, even if they haven't always been followed? And I understand the difference between an enemy fighter and a common criminal.
But it seems that all the recent arguments suggesting that to be treated humanely a prisoner must wear a uniform, are irrelevant. If not covered by the Geneva Convention, enemy combatants would simply be legally required to be treated the way America legally treats prisoners, and that would mean that they would not be tortured, or summarily executed, or held indefinitely.
That common right-wing argument leads inevitably to the conclusion that illegal immigrants accused of a crime have no legal rights whatsoever, since they do not wear a uniform and they are not US citizens. Is this why so many on the right ridicule suggestions that police action is the proper way to fight terrorism?
How is it that the Bush Administration has been able to argue for so long that, without Geneva Convention protections, torture and indefinite imprisonment is legal against non-citizens? Why do we keep trying to argue whether the Geneva Convention applies? If it doesn't, then doesn't American law even matter? Or were our official standards of treatment always much lower than I imagined?
Yeah, 9/11 changed everything, I know. But surely it didn't change what came before.
Thanks for any comments--I'm not a lawyer, and I'm serious about the question.
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Update:
Apparently I asked this very poorly--let me try again, if anyone's still listening:
Did American action change as a result of the Geneva Conventions? Was our policy of giving quarter to the enemy ever codified in law, or was it something that could be ignored at any time before the geneva conventions were enacted?