Crimes, War Crimes and the War on Terror

[wm]

The term "kangaroo court" is a dishonest slur on the US attempt to, in fact, bring the detainees before a tribunal to determine their status, in accordance with Art. 5. of the Third Geneva Convention.

If this last is in reference to my use of the phrase 'kangaroo court' in a previous post, please note that I put the phrase in double quotes, which is a fairly common convention for identifying that the wording is being applied in a non-standard way. Double quotes are used to indicate that such an attribution of the noun phrase is a degenerative case, not a standard use for the phrase. I do not view the Gitmo Tribunal as a kangaroo court. I was suggesting that part of the US motivation for holding trials might be very pragmatic--to try to prevent other entities from holding kangaroo court proceedings with US citizens as "defendants." (Please again note the use of the double quotes--a person being charged by a kangaroo court is hardly one to whom the appelation 'defendant' is appropriately applied.)

BTW, I concur with Rex's 4 reasons for abiding by and supporting IHL. I just happen to arrange them in a different priority order. I'd rank the 4 reasons in order of importance as 4, 2, 1, 3 (and 2 is actually a subcategory of 4--it is an example of keeping a promise, which is just another right thing to do.)

BTW, I follow a linguistic convention in the philosophy of logic and language with my use of single quotes. They are being used as a way of differentiating between using a word or phrase as an operative part of a sentence and mentioning that word or phrase--that is, using the words as a name for the word or phrase found inside the single quotes. For example, snow refers to the white stuff on the ground; 'snow' refers to the name we use for the white stuff on the ground.