I was going to post about Colin Powell’s charge that President Bush is seeking to reinterpret Article III of the Geneva Conventions in the Military Commissions Act of 2006 now working its way through the house. The legislation is very hard to read for a non-law person such as myself, so I held back.

Captain’s Quarters has an interesting point about all this talk about the GC:

Senator McCain is hardly the only American POW who had experience with GC violations, and that’s the point. We have yet to fight against a wartime enemy that followed the GC with any consistency at all. The Germans routinely violated it even before Hitler began issuing orders to shoot captured pilots, and the massacre at Malmedy only crystallized what had been fairly brutal treatment at the hands of the Nazis for American prisoners (the Luftwaffe was one notable exception). The Japanese treatment of POWs was nothing short of barbaric, both before and after Bataan. The same is true for the North Koreans and the Chinese in the Korean War, and McCain himself is a routine example of the kind of treatment our men suffered at the hands of the Vietnamese.

In this war, this argument seems particularly despicable. We have been treated to images of broken and tortured bodies of our soldiers on television and the Internet, courtesy of the animals who oppose us in this war. No one suffers under the delusion that captured soldiers will ever return alive, let alone receive Geneva-approved treatment. Our enemy doesn’t even fight according to the GC, so why should they treat our soldiers any better than they treat the civilians they target for their attacks?

Not only do our enemies violate the Geneva Convention with the mistreatment of our POWs, but also in the use of their own citizens as human shields and fodder for moral outrage when said “innocents” are killed, such as in Lebanon.

What is the incentive here by Powell? Is he hoping that if we treat the enemy according to the Geneva Conventions that they will be impressed by our moral superiority and do the same themselves? They haven’t been too impressed with our morals on other issues. We shouldn’t shelter them from the consequences of their own actions.