MUST READ: OF THE GENEVA CONVENTIONS, "TORTURE BANS," & MURDERED SOLDIERS: PEOPLE ON BOTH SIDES OF THE ISLE NEED TO OPEN THEIR EYES

Of the Geneva Conventions, “Torture Bans,” and Murdered Soldiers: People on both sides of the aisle need to open their eyes
By Jeff Emanuel

On May 12, near the Sunni stronghold of Yusufiya, Iraq (about 15 miles south of Baghdad), al Qaeda fighters ambushed a coalition patrol, killing four soldiers and abducting three, all from the 4th Battalion, 31st Infantry Regiment of the 10th Mountain Division's 2nd Brigade Combat Team (based at Fort Drum, New York).

Despite warnings from al Qaeda “not to look for the soldiers if [they] wanted them back alive,” American and Iraqi forces mobilized almost 4,000 troops to conduct a search for the missing men. The force spent much of the next weeks searching the area around Mahmoudiya, in the much-publicized “Triangle of Death.” Though they questioned over 450 people and detained 11 as a part of the probe, the soldiers were, unfortunately, not successfully recovered.

On the morning of Wednesday, May 23, Hassan al-Jibouri, an Iraqi boater, saw a body floating in the Euphrates River. It had “head wounds and whip marks on its back,” said al-Jibouri, who alerted police about the discovery. Before the day was over, the body had been identified as being one of the three missing soldiers, PFC Joe Anzack, a 20-year-old from California.

Two weeks later, on Monday, June 4, the so-called “Islamic State of Iraq” (ISI), an al Qaeda front group within that nation, released a video in which they said that the other two American captives, SPC Alex Jimenez, 25, of Massachusetts, and PVT Byron Fouty, 19, of Michigan, had been killed in captivity. Repeatedly mocking the “American military’s inability to find the soldiers,” the video showed what appeared to be the two soldiers’ identification cards, as well as other personal items, as evidence.

This treatment of captive military combatants is, of course, squarely against the 1949 Geneva Conventions – the same rules of war which America is often accused, both by our foreign enemies and by domestic representatives of the “anti-war” movement, of violating. While the question of whether plain clothed foreign terrorists with no state or military affiliation, who are captured targeting civilians and purposely fighting amongst noncombatants, are entitled to the Conventions’ protections is, perhaps, still open for debate, there is no question that America’s soldiers, fighting in uniform, representing their country, and strictly adhering to the laws of armed conflict are officially protected by these agreements.

Interestingly and predictably silent in the week since the ISI announced that it had murdered the remaining captives have been the “human rights” groups who seem to spend every day accusing the United States of phantom “torture,” war crimes, and various human rights violations, while largely ignoring the real crimes carried out by our enemies. Rather than even mention the killing of these American troops, or any other atrocities carried out on a daily basis by al Qaeda in Iraq (AQIZ), Amnesty International dedicated the front page of their website this last week to headlines decrying “secret CIA detention” facilities, and mourning “another death at Guantanamo after [an] apparent suicide.” The United Nations, always quick to condemn the acts of the US and Israel, had nothing whatsoever to say about this latest atrocity on the part of the Islamic terrorists against whom we are fighting in this war that former Secretary General Kofi Annan has repeatedly called “illegal.” Instead, according to its website, the UN was busy “marking 40 years of occupation by Israel of the Palestinian Territory” and “asking students to join the fight against climate change.”

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Pertinent Links:

1) Of the Geneva Conventions, “Torture Bans,” and Murdered Soldiers: People on both sides of the aisle need to open their eyes

2) Family Security Matters