This is the point i can never get across to the die hard conservative repubs i happen across. I even tried to explain it like this:

If someone tries to kill me, I have the right to kill them. I do not have the right to put him in my basement and torture him for months or even years. The police would arrest me for doing that.

If someone just says they want to kill me, I don't have the right etc etc

If I hear someone else say that someone else might want to kill me or knows a person who said that they wanted to kill me, etc etc

People still didn't grasp it.

Regardless, article 26 of the Geneva convention, our international agreement on how to treat prisoners of war, recognizes that

and it declares there will be no physical, emotional or mental torture or coercion of prisoners of war.

If you can't accept this on legal or moral grounds, then even a troll should recognize the difference between a minor and an adult.

Summary of the UN Convention against torture

Or, perhaps, we should focus on finding actual high-level leaders, prosecuting them in a legal court, sentencing them to whatever sentence is decided, carrying out that sentence, and getting some closure. Instead of picking up confused teenagers who have been forced into battle by their families.

Because, of course, the only way to react to a wrong is by a larger wrong. There's no chance he might take the moral high ground and walk away.

I'll quote trolls like you as much as I want, thank you very much.

Did you miss the part where he was employed as a highly trained combat servant? He was fucking clothes. That might give you a clue as to his desire to enter actual combat. al Qaeda isn't a group to stop someone from fighting because of their age. If he had wanted to fight, he would have been given a gun, pointed in the direction of US soldiers, and been told not to expect to come back.

Just like all Islamic kids, right? You make me sick.

we don't prosecute soldiers for killing soldiers. however, i believe the geneva convention defines a soldier as a combatant who wears a uniform fighting for an organized military structure as a part of a recognized government. al- qaeda and the taleban don't fall into these catgories, aren't recognized by any international treaty as made up of legitimate soldiers and are thus categorized as unlawful enemy combatants (not to endorse a bastardized bushism). they, therefore aren't protected under the "rules of war," formally or otherwise, and are subject to prosecution under many international laws.
that being said, i still think we need to take a hard look at what defines our humanity and us as a nation. mistreatment of a child who was indoctrinated into a terrorist organization is still mistreatment of a child and this will help to negatively color the world's view of modern america. thus, i don't think we need to "recognize the rules of war" since the organizations we are engaging don't do such; however, i think we need to recognize that the treatment of this child in guantanamo presents a real risk of pushing us one step closer to becoming the 'enemy' we are supposed to be fighting.

You put your children on the battlefield and bad things are going to happen. They call it war. It's not different from any war in the history of man, and we should always be fighting on the enemy's terms and not some false belief that we must treat an enemy with mercy or dispassion.

We're supposed to be better than that. We're supposed to behave a certain way or else we're no better than those warlords who give guns to 10 year old kids and send them into battle.

Ok, take a step back for a minute and think about what I am about to say, this is not a justification for guantanimo or any of the treatment which is under law illegal under military and civil statutes of just about any country.

In any conflict the longer it goes on the more hardened both sides become and worse and worse atrocities become justified in the eyes of the combatants. Altho Iraq and Afghanistan are fairly recent Islamic terrorists have been staging attacks for decades and the US has been hit. Considering things like the Daniel Pearl killing and constant almost daily suicide bombings of civilians it's not actually that far of a stretch for people who have to deal with that sort of thing to no longer see the other side as being human anymore. I know we would all like to think that we would be able to always know right from wrong black from white, but it's not always the case, yes we are using tactics that are as deplorable as the ones the enemy uses. All of this did not all spring up in a vacume it was a progression to this point and as long as it's ok for people to be killed in the name of Allah it's going to be ok in the eyes of some to do equally deplorable things in the name of freedom.

Ask yourselves are we the monster, are they the monster or did we just end up creating each other?

i agree, but a prison cell isn't a battlefield. his treatment occurred after he was disarmed and no longer a threat. if you put children into a war they will be killed, i know. but i think our greatest punishments should be reserved for those who put the children there, not the children themselves.

interesting perspective, people don't often make the effort to thoroughly analyze that many aspects of such a complex issue.

Yeah, why let things as wimpy as "ethics" or "morals" get in the away of allowing American soldiers to threaten a teenage prisoner with rape?

But the people in charge of Guantanamo Bay don't encounter daily suicide bombings.

I'd say that the people who claim it's acceptable to do deplorable things in the name of Allah are just as fucked up and wrong as the people who claim it's acceptable to do deplorable things in the name of "freedom" or "America".

The "but everyone else is doing it" argument doesn't trump things like basic human rights.

Please don't take part of what I have said and put it out of context. Go back and read what I wrote because you seem to be missing the point, and I mean that respectfully not to be a jerk.

what you call false belief, i (and many others) call the current evolution of morality. i recognize that in war/conflict, the course of fighting and the tactics employed by the parties involved can blur the lines to a point where they are almost illegible, but completely tossing aside the lines and the whole of the Conventions that dictated those lines because they are an inconvenience and prevent grossly inefficient and ineffective conduct that seems to be conducted merely for the pleasure of those in charge of such conduct is barbaric, inhumane, uncivilized, amoral, unconscionable, and deplorable.

and nowhere do the Geneva Conventions mention that it is ok to conduct oneself (as a country at war, or in a state of conflict) such as the USA has done merely because those one is fighting fail to follow the Conventions themselves.

I don't care who the monster is. We cannot change "them." To do so would require us to become the worst monsters in history. We can change ourselves. We can change the foreign policies that lead people to start or join terrorist groups. We can behave in a civilized way towards those we capture, regardless of whether they are wearing uniforms or not. We can activly try to change the world so dictators and fanatics cannot rise to power.

We cannot change the past.