WSJ: Red Double-Crossed Again -- The ICRC betrays America--and the Geneva Conventions

...[T]he ICRC is alleging that the psychological conditions faced by Guantanamo detainees are "tantamount to torture."... Because--we kid you not--prisoners are being held for indefinite periods, and the uncertainty is stressful. And because some prisoners are subjected to psychological pressure techniques during interrogations aimed at thwarting further terrorist attacks.

...The basic idea behind granting POW status is that soldiers who surrender or are captured are not to be punished so long as they have behaved according to certain rules--such as fighting in uniform and doing their best to direct their own attacks at enemy soldiers rather than civilians. Part of their protection from punishment is that they not be subject to coercive interrogation; they are required only to give name, rank and serial number. They may, however, be held for the duration of the conflict so that they do not return to the battlefield.

The POW concept is certainly a great humanitarian advance, since the slaughter of captured enemies used to be routine and since it provides some incentive to fair battlefield conduct. But it is a concept in jeopardy thanks to its ostensible guardians at the ICRC. By demanding POW status for un-uniformed combatants who target civilians--in contravention of the plain language of the Geneva Conventions--the ICRC started the fight over Guantanamo by attempting to remove one of the few carrots we have to encourage humane behavior in war.

Now it goes further and demands that these combatants get even more privileges than legitimate POWs. Has it occurred to no one in Geneva that indefinite detention can't possibly be "tantamount to torture" for illegal combatants if it is the expected course of events for real POWs? The prospect of Guantanamo detainees returning to the battlefield is real, and more than two dozen of those already released have done so....

Footnote:

Readers who doubt the ICRC's moral drift might want to consult the recent report from the panel on the Abu Ghraib controversy headed by former Defense Secretary Jim Schlesinger. It contains an excellent section on the ICRC's recent attempts to pass off as settled international law a radical document that is in fact aimed at assisting terrorists and so-called "national liberation" movements (see page 85 of the report, which is available here in PDF). That Red Cross document, known as Protocol 1, has always been rejected by the U.S. and other major governments, and the ICRC's attempt to pretend otherwise with its media spin is also a serious abuse of trust.

No longer careful, scrupulous and neutral, the ICRC has become just another politicized pressure group like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. ICRC President Jakob Kellenberger is reportedly planning to visit Washington soon to press the U.S. government on Guantanamo and other issues. We hope he is told that he is leading his organization toward the loss of its $100 million-plus annual subsidy from U.S. taxpayers, as well as its special status come future revisions of the Geneva Conventions.

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Red Double-Crossed Again

Red Double-Crossed Again The ICRC betrays America--and the Geneva Conventions.
Posted by Rakkasan1
On News/Activism 12/02/2004 9:40:33 AM EST · 22 replies · 290+ views
Wall Street Journal ^ | 12-02-04 | WSJ editors

WSJ: Red Double-Crossed Again -- The ICRC betrays America--and the Geneva Conventions
Posted by OESY
On News/Activism 12/02/2004 8:45:15 AM EST · 6 replies · 225+ views
opinionjournal.com ^ | December 2, 2004 | Editorial

Ed. Note: The prior post you cite did not appear during my search because the title used was typed and not copied/pasted. Thus, the hyphen in DOUBLE-CROSSED was missed. C'est La Vie.

Birds Do It, Bees Do It, Even GOPs Do It

"There is a little-known movement sweeping across the United States," writes David Brooks in the New York Times. "The movement is 'natalism' ":

All across the industrialized world, birthrates are falling - in Western Europe, in Canada and in many regions of the United States. People are marrying later and having fewer kids. But spread around this country, and concentrated in certain areas, the natalists defy these trends. . . .

There are significant fertility inequalities across regions. People on the Great Plains and in the Southwest are much more fertile than people in New England or on the Pacific coast. You can see surprising political correlations. As Steve Sailer pointed out in The American Conservative, George Bush carried the 19 states with the highest white fertility rates, and 25 of the top 26. John Kerry won the 16 states with the lowest rates.

Why this would be surprising, we don't know; we've been writing about the Roe effect for years. And isn't "the Roe effect" a catchier and more provocative name than "natalism"? Brooks, though, seems to be trying to play down the provocativeness of his argument, perhaps to avoid alarming the sensitive Times readership: "Natalists are associated with red America, but they're not launching a jihad," he writes. "The differences between them and people on the other side of the cultural or political divide are differences of degree, not kind." Maybe true, but voting is a binary choice; there are no "differences of degree."

* * *

Another Times writer who acknowledged the Roe effect in passing is Matt Bai, whose Nov. 21 magazine article on how the Dems lost Ohio included this delightful passage:

This [Republican turnout] effort wasn't visible to Democrats because it was taking place on an entirely new terrain, in counties that Democrats had some vague notion of, but which they never expected could generate so many votes. The 10 Ohio counties with the highest turnout percentages, many of them small and growing, all went for Bush, and none of them had a turnout rate of less than 75 percent.

For Democrats, this new phenomenon on Election Day felt like some kind of horror movie, with conservative voters rising up out of the hills and condo communities in numbers the Kerry forces never knew existed. ''They just came in droves,'' [Kerry spokeswoman] Jennifer Palmieri told me two days after the election. ''We didn't know they had that room to grow. It's like, 'Crunch all you want--we'll make more.' They just make more Republicans.''

One of these days someone should sit down with the Democrats and explain where Republicans come from.

-- BEST OF THE WEB TODAY

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