The United States magnanimously decided to give the persons detained at Guantanamo the same privileges as to food, shelter, medical care, Red Cross inspections, etc. that prisoners of war are entitled to under the Geneva Convention. But they were NEVER prisoners of war. They were and are, instead, unlawful enemy combatants, and they were not entitled to ANY of the privileges of legitimate POW's. Unlawful enemy combatants, the best-known examples of which are probably spies and saboteurs, are commonly known as war criminals. Anyone who is unclear about these distinctions--and what they mean for the rights of the person in captivity--should read the "Nazi Saboteurs Case," Ex Parte Quirin, 317 U.S. 1 (1942), where the Supreme Court discussed them in detail.
All the detainees at Guantanamo should long ago have been tried before military tribunals. Any who were found innocent should have been released. And every damned Islamic jihadist son of a whore who was convicted of war crimes should either have been imprisoned, or if his crimes were serious enough, marched onto a gallows, hooded, and had his greasy neck stretched--with the proceedings televised live around the world as a message to his friends. I hope that when this country finally gets a serious President, instead of the limpwristed leftist fop now disgracing the White House, whose heart is less with the country he is sworn to defend than with the Islamic supremacist monsters who want to destroy us, that new President will treat those monsters to regular and very large doses of vitamins B-1, B-2, and B-52.