Anton: “Steve P, You seem to have missed the point about them being “outside the law”. This is a very specific legal status and is the basis for the term “outlaw”. This means that such a person is literally outside the law, they have no standing at all, they can be killed at will and have no legal recourse.”
This is a status that they chose for themselves. It wasn’t inflicted upon them, they looked at the situation and deliberately chose the path of action that led them to that state.
Read (I mean actually read) the Geneva Conventions, they are short and to the point. Any person fighting as a combatant while not in uniform and fighting for a recognized power is an illegal combatant and thus has no rights.
The US legal system does not have any mechanism for charging these persons. There is no Federal or State law that I know of that addresses ilegal acts committed by illegal combatants on the soil of another country. Maybe you could poke through the law books and find a charge, heck if we can’t charge these guys maybe you would like to give them a room at your house while they “rehab” into productive persons.”
Anton, nobody is outside the law. That’s the whole point of there being law. Take your semantic BS elsewhere. And don’t hide behind the Geneva Conventions. We’ve broken them before, and we’ll break them again. And don’t say that we’re just helpless to bring these guys up on charges, that’s just wussy. If American lawyers are clever enough to make waterboarding legal, which also is in direct violations of the Geneva Conventions, then I’m damn sure that they’re clever enough to bring war crimes charges against terrorists that will stick.
