Via the NYT: Captured Insurgents: U.S. Said to Hold More Foreigners in Iraq Fighting
After raids in recent months that captured hundreds of insurgents in Iraq, the United States has significantly increased the number of prisoners it says are foreign fighters, a group the Bush administration contends are not protected by the Geneva Conventions, American officials said.A Pentagon official said Friday that the United States was now holding 325 foreign fighters in Iraq, a number that the official said had increased by 140 since Nov. 7, just before the invasion of Falluja. Many of the non-Iraqis were captured in or around that city.
Many of them are suspected of links to Al Qaeda or the related terror networks supporting the insurgency in Iraq, senior Bush administration officials said this week.
While it is undoubtedly true that foreign irregular comabnatants don’t fall under the Geneva Conventions, I think we need to figure out what that means in far clearer terms than we have heretofore laid out.
Plus, it would help if the press woulld be a tad mroe clear about what the Geneva Conventions are and why it might be that they don’t apply to certain persons.
To me the more interesting fact in this story is that there have been the capture of hundreds of foreign fighters.
And I still say that keeping these people indefinitely “just in case” isn’t sound policy.