a question about Guantanamo

[BayouBengal07]

Do the prisoners there recieve POW status or are they still "enemy combatants?" If they are declared POWs, don't we have to allow International Red Cross in to observe their health and status? Do we skirt that by declaring them "enemy combatants" instead of Prisoners of War?

That's just disgusting if that's how it goes.

[LynnTheDem]

1. bush says the non-existant "enemy combatant". ICRC, US SC, UN,

US law, etc all say "POW'.

Yes, as POWs the ICRC has the right to speak with & observe their health, status etc.

Yes that's how bush skirts that.

Yes it's disgusting. It's also incredibly harmful to every US citizen, because it makes the other 98.5% of the planet's citizens hate our guts.

[NoPasaran]

2. According to Busholini,

They are not POWs, they are "unlawful combatants", an undefined catagory which allows their jailers to do pretty much anything they wish.

[Inland]

3. Here's what to remember.

One of the most mindnumbing aspects of law is classifying people. If they are POWs, they have one set of rights. If they are criminals, they have another set of rights. What you have to remember is that Bushites don't want people to have rights, so they make up another category which is neither POW nor criminal, and therefore there isn't any set of precedents or case law that applies, supposedly, and therefore no rights.

What the Bushies call the new category is unimportant. I had a law school professor who said, "you could call it a banana for all I care". The important point is that none of the rights of the previous categories applies, according to Bush.

Bushites do the same thing domestically. In law school, I learned that a person was either a suspect, in which case there was a right to detain him and he had a suspect's rights, or not a suspect. But Ashcroft invented another category, a "person of interest", who they could hold as if he were a suspect but had none of the rights a suspect in custody had. Exact same thing. Only suspects have rights, and although he looks like a suspect, and is treated like a suspect, we aren't going to call him a suspect. Call him a banana.