ABSTRACT
In response to international criticism of the treatment of Taliban and Al-Qaeda prisoners captured in Afghanistan and held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba in January 2002, President Bush expressed the view that they were being treated no better than the American public thought they should be treated. We can set aside the question as to how precisely President Bush knew how the American public thought the prisoners should be treated: the point is that public opinion apparently legitimated the prisoners’ conditions. The fact that the Guantanamo detainees had not yet been charged with, let alone convicted of, any criminal offence apparently counted for nothing. They were simply ‘unlawful combatants’. The rights inscribed in the Geneva Conventions were said initially not to apply to them. The American people supported their President in his crusade against evil. The exercise being conducted at ‘Camp X-ray’ would extirpate the cancer of international terrorism, and the public approved. Period.
