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As far as I know, I am making no mistake. We are bound by Geneva. al Qaeda cannot be a party to Geneva whether they want to or not. That was decided during the debate over the additional protocols. Not to mention that we did sign those protocols. In case you don't remember, the PLO attempted to sign the additional protocols, and to sign the four 1949 conventions. They were rejected by the Swiss Federal Council as not being a state party. They have since been allowed to sign (1989) since they formed a government in the West Bank and Gaza.
But it was Article 44 of Protocol I which specifies rights for exactly such groups under capture that Doug Feith objected to, by the way. He has since made a career of promoting the idea that the Geneva Conventions are a system of rewards and punishments, and that good treatment of prisoners should be conditioned on prior behavior in combat. That is not the interpretation of the commentaries or the ICRC, nor was it the opinion when it was signed. The Geneva Conventions are a humanitarian social contract, not a system of rewards for good behavior.
What's wrong with the theory (other than the fact that Mr. Feith and his law partner Mark Zell don't believe Palestinians have any rights at all because they are squatters on land given by god to the Israelis) is that there is no way for an unrecognized armed force to get humane treatment whatsoever under your interpretation. Look at the comments I put up earlier by TJAG Thomas Romig. Before an Article 5 hearing, anyone taken prisoner gets all the rights, always. Up until the creative law brigade in the Bush administration decided to say otherwise. But they are not the arbiters of what the Conventions mean.
People here have been debating corporations and laws. One prime difference between real persons and corporations is the corporations do tend to treat laws as systems of punishments and rewards. That isn't the way societies treat them at all. Anyone who thinks otherwise believes that all of us are constantly calculating our best expected gain before obeying anything at all, which just isn't the case with flesh and blood human beings.
