Reply #39: I misspelled weird, oops... [View All]

You said, "It is not clear that insurgents have any military rights.",
well with that in mind, then every resistance movement that fought against the Germans in WWII, "legally" didn't have any military rights either.


Right. Odd isn't it? I think the current GC on Occupation Forces is post WW-II, and was developed specifically to codify as illegal the sort of things done by the Germans in their occupied territories. The stuff we hung a bunch of them for after WWII. For example collective punishment is categorically forbidden.

My understanding is that while insurgents don't have military rights (for example they are not POWs when captured,) all people (including insurgents) within an occupied territory have rights under the GC that in most respects are vastly superior to those afforded POWs and soldiers. The crap we pulled in al-grahib for example is strictly forbidden. No doubt we are torturing detainees right now, or at least our iraqi surrogates are torturing detainees for us right now.