The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) is an impressive edifice--both physically and morally. Its Swiss headquarters, once a Belle Epoch luxury hotel, is perched on a commanding height overlooking Lake Geneva. Just below is the Palais des Nations, formerly home to President Woodrow Wilson's ill-fated League, and now occupied by the United Nations. The whole area exudes a comfortable, faded-paint kind of civility--complete with peacocks roaming free on the UN lawns below. It is, of course, home to the world's oldest non-religious organization dedicated to humanitarian relief--an organization with a unique place in international law, identified by the four 1949 Geneva Conventions as an "impartial humanitarian body."
It is in this ostensible role that the ICRC has clashed with the Bush Administration. Early in 2002, President Bush determined that captured Al-Qaeda and Taliban members were not legally entitled to be treated as "prisoners of war" (POWs) under the Geneva Conventions, which reserve the multifarious rights and privileges of POWs for groups that meet the basic criteria of "lawful" belligerency. Those requirements were drawn from earlier international practice and agreements, and include subordination to a responsible command structure, wearing uniforms, carrying arms openly, and operating in accord with the other laws and customs of war. These are the elements that distinguish regular armies from irregular or guerrilla fighters, not to mention terrorists.
Neither Al-Qaeda nor the Taliban meets these minimum requirements and, as a result, the president concluded that those groups were "unlawful" or "unprivileged" enemy combatants. Such individuals are entitled to be treated humanely. However, they are also subject to prosecution in military courts and may simply be held, without a criminal trial, until the war is over--even if that takes years. Wars sometimes do.
