Geneva Conventions? Is that a chocolatier gathering? - posted at 00:53

Out with the old, in with the new: in this case, John Ashcroft is old and Alberto Gonzales is new. "Hooray!" many of you may be thinking. "Porn will be safe again!" While I might not like porn myself, I recognize that it's protected under free speech, and the way John Ashcroft was underhanded, retarded, and made no sense. I'm not sure that porn and thus free speech will be any safer under his replacement (wait, this is the Bush administration, who are we kidding), but I'm worried about some of the other implications behind this appointment.

One thing that made Alberto Gonzales (in)famous is his treatment of prisoners of war, though he certainly wouldn't use that term to describe the people in question. His memo to the president recommended that people captured with suspected links to al-Qaeda and the Taliban not be considered prisoners of war. They've also had all sorts of fun rights denied to them, such as being charged with something or having a trial. Best of all, the Geneva Conventions don't apply to them.

Now this... this is a major problem. You cannot arbitrarily decide to disregard the Geneva Conventions because it suits your purposes. That defeats their entire purpose. What's to stop some other nation holding American detainees from deciding the same thing? We'd be fucking pissed if our soldiers were tortured because the government holding them "decided" they weren't POW's -- oh wait, that already happened to us. That was Vietnam. Chalk that one up to another history lesson not learned by our administration.

I worry about any American soldier detained by another country because of this. We've already shown ourselves to be capable of forgetting about not only restraint but also humanism in the last year, and I frankly wouldn't blame another nation if they did the same. How could we possibly object? We would be total hypocrites. The only way I can possibly see the administration justifying it is by saying that war hasn't been officially declared, so you can't have prisoners of war, but Bush speaks of war so often -- and even calls himself a War President -- that that just wouldn't make any sense.

This whole dismissing-the-Geneva-Conventions bit isn't helping our case on the whole any either. It's certainly not going to convince any Islamists (which doesn't mean Muslims, but rather Muslim Fundamentalists/Extremists) that we are any less the Imperialistic Infidels that they already believe us to be. I sincerely believe that this policy needs to be re-thought or else it is going to come back and bite us in the ass tenfold.

One of these days I will stop posting about politics. That day will probably be when they stop pissing me off.

cleolove commented:

Considering you are one of the few people who seem to be able to speak of political issues with a clear head, common sense, and an understanding of our history, I say "NEVER STOP" ... there are so few who can do this.

Stacey commented:

I had a teacher in high school who was very big on making us view current events through a lens of history. I think it's served me well, but I wish more of us had learned how to think like that. I think we would be in a much better position as a nation if we had.

And don't worry -- if something political makes me mad, you guys will probably be the firs to know!