That was the view of Eric Holder, Oama’s choice for Attorney General, in a CNN inteview in 2002 (as recalled by the WSJ today):

One of the things we clearly want to do with these prisoners is to have an ability to interrogate them and find out what their future plans might be, where other cells are located; under the Geneva Convention that you are really limited in the amount of information that you can elicit from people.
It seems to me that given the way in which they have conducted themselves, however, that they are not, in fact, people entitled to the protection of the Geneva Convention. They are not prisoners of war. If, for instance, Mohamed Atta had survived the attack on the World Trade Center, would we now be calling him a prisoner of war? I think not. Should Zacarias Moussaoui be called a prisoner of war? Again, I think not.

In recent years, this has been the argument put forward by such conservatives as Andy McCarthy and me (most recently in this Commentary review of Jane Mayer’s book blasting the current administration for betraying American values by taking such views).

Let’s hope Holder sticks to his guns on this.