The Myth of Bush’s Torture Regime

THE question was whether terrorists should get the privileges the Geneva Conventions grant to honorable combatants. The answer was firm: “We must not, and need not, give recognition and protection to terrorist groups as a price for progress in humanitarian law.”

These are the words not of George W. Bush but of the Washington Post. The editors were approvingly quoting Pres. Ronald Reagan, in a 1987 editorial supporting Reagan’s refusal to sign “Protocol I,” an addendum to Geneva that extended to terrorists the Conventions’ ban on the compulsory interrogation of lawful combatants. The New York Times, too, recoiled at the thought of “giving terrorists the status of POWs.”