The United States is holding otherwise innocent civilians as hostages.

In a little-noticed development amid Iraq's prison abuse scandal, the U.S. military is holding dozens of Iraqis as bargaining chips to put pressure on their wanted relatives to surrender, according to human rights groups. These detainees are not accused of any crimes, and experts say their detention violates the Geneva Conventions and other international laws. The practice also risks associating the United States with the tactics of countries that it has long criticized for arbitrary arrests.

Reference: Newsday.com - World News

To my otherwise naive way of looking at things, conditioning the release of a prisoner upon the surrender of a wanted fugitive is tantamount to state sponsored kidnapping and/or hostage taking. I cannot begin to count the ways this is violative of everything the US used to stand for before George Bush. And if you have the gall to say that 9/11 changed everything and I can't blame Shrub, then my friends, the terrorist have already won.

They have managed to get us to destroy what we once were. We used to be able to proudly proclaim to the world -- that we were, but no longer are, the beacon of liberty and the best hope for mankind. We now, with arrogant impunity, reside in the new paranoid paradigm of the expedient.

Officals have of course denied a "systematic practice of detaining relatives to pressure Iraqi fugatives."

"Relatives who might have information about wanted persons are sometimes detained for questioning, and then they are released. There is no policy of holding people as bargaining chips."

However dozens of cases have been documented where family members, accused of no crime whatsoever, have been detained for weeks or months or, in the most notorious of these cases, indefinitely. Perhaps that is why the Red Cross said that up to 90% of the abu Ghraib prisoners were innocent.

Make one thing certain in your mind. A violation of the Geneva convention is a War Crime. Hostage taking is a War Crime. Torture is a War Crime. "Material Witness" is a farse, a fiction.

After Hussein was captured last year, al-Douri became the most wanted man in Iraq, and Washington put a $10 million bounty on his head.

Al-Douri's wife and daughter are still in U.S. custody, although rights monitors say they have not been charged with any crime. Rights groups say the United States is committing a war crime by detaining al-Douri's relatives without charge. "Taking hostages is a grave breach of the Geneva Conventions -- in other words, a war crime," Human Rights Watch wrote in a January letter to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

The senior U.S. military official declined to discuss the detention of al-Douri's relatives, saying it is a "special case with very unusual circumstances." In the past, U.S. officials had likened the detentions to those of a material witness who is held for questioning.

But rights monitors say there is no basis under international law for holding family members as material witnesses. "That explanation is dubious at best," said Alistair Hodgett, a spokesman for Amnesty International USA.

Detaining the relatives of a fugitive is a form of "moral coercion" forbidden under the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949, according to Quigley. The convention, which guarantees the rights of civilians under military occupation, also prohibits punishing someone for an offense that he has not personally committed.

Nueremberg-like Trials are only for the vanqished. If there was still a Yugoslavia, Slobidan Milosovich would not be appearing before the Hague.

Neither Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, or Donald Feith, let alone Bush, Inc. or CheneyBurton will face any charges. They are accountable to nobody but the voters. We no longer are an electorate, we are a jury.

UPDATE: BeatBushBlog has an excellent legal analysis of how the Geneva Conventions apply. I'm so glad he did it, I was too tired.

Hat Tip: Kevin Drum