Detainee-Trial Evidence Was Allegedly Destroyed

RightinNYC said:

To the best of my knowledge, most of the detainees in Gbay are not in any way covered by the geneva convention.

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The detainees held have been classified by the United States as "enemy combatants" The Bush administration had claimed that these prisoners were not entitled to the protections of the Geneva Conventions, but the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against this interpretation on 29 June 2006.[4] Following this, on July 7, 2006, the Department of Defense issued an internal memo stating that prisoners will in the future be entitled to protection under the Geneva Conventions.

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shuamort said:

Here's where I got the idea that they were:

Here's a link to the SCOTUS ruling too.

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The appeals court agreed with the Government that the Conventions do not apply because Hamdan was captured during the war with al Qaeda, which is not a Convention signatory, and that conflict is distinct from the war with signatory Afghanistan. The Court need not decide the merits of this argumentbecause there is at least one provision of the Geneva Conventions that applies here even if the relevant conflict is not between signatories. Common Article 3, which appears in all four Conventions, provides that, in a “conflict not of an international character occurring inthe territory of one of the High Contracting Parties [i.e., signatories],each Party to the conflict shall be bound to apply, as a minimum,”certain provisions protecting “[p]ersons . . . placed hors de combat by. . . detention,” including a prohibition on “the passing of sentences . . . without previous judgment . . . by a regularly constituted court affording all the judicial guarantees . . . recognized as indispensable bycivilized peoples.” The D. C. Circuit ruled Common Article 3 inapplicable to Hamdan because the conflict with al Qaeda is international in scope and thus not a “conflict not of an international character. ”That reasoning is erroneous. That the quoted phrase bears its literalmeaning and is used here in contradistinction to a conflict betweennations is demonstrated by Common Article 2, which limits its ownapplication to any armed conflict between signatories and providesthat signatories must abide by all terms of the Conventions even if another party to the conflict is a nonsignatory, so long as the nonsignatory “accepts and applies” those terms. Common Article 3, by contrast, affords some minimal protection, falling short of full protectionunder the Conventions, to individuals associated with neither a signatory nor even a nonsignatory who are involved in a conflict “in the territory of” a signatory. The latter kind of conflict does not involve a clash between nations (whether signatories or not).

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