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Read it. You have interesting ideas as to what constitutes a war zone, a battlefield, and an armed conflict. Because of those, your interpretation of the Geneva Conventions is flawed, it mimics that of the Bush administration in large part, except that they also argued the opposite of everything, not wanting, I guess, to leave any opinion unadopted.
The ICRC asserts that Geneva protections apply to all prisoners taken by our military, at least to Article 3 and to disclosure and hearings for the prisoners, the Supreme Court asserts the same, the courts of other countries assert the same. It would appear that only you, and possibly the Bush administration, believe otherwise.
What constitutes a war zone is something that can be declared by a high contracting party, or by the ICRC, but it is a physical zone, not something like "the whole world since we can be attacked anywhere". What constitutes a battlefield is a specific area within that war zone. It is extremely interesting that you assert a "new kind of war" in defining a battlefield to use the Geneva Conventions, then assert that "there are no new kinds of war" to dismiss one of the parties of the conflict as ineligible. With regards to the current conflicts we are involved in, Congress shares some of the blame for the lack of clarity, because of an extremely sloppy authorization of use of military force. Exactly who was responsible for its wording, I don't know, but Congress is responsible for passing it.
By the way, it was the U.S. that asserted to the Committee Against Torture (2006) both that the fight with al Qaeda was an "armed conflict" and that the Geneva Conventions applied -- in fact, the U.S. tried to assert that the Geneva Conventions trumped the Convention Against Torture under a doctrine of lex specialis during war, something with which the Committee did not agree. It was kind of the international version of boiling the entire Constitution down to only the phrase "shall be the Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy" whenever a war was asserted.
I will concede that it would greatly improve clarity to ratify the additional protocols, but I've already said that in numerous fora. If we do not, then personally, I think we are bound by the fact that we have signed them, until we remove our signatures.
I'm not a lawyer, but I am a humanitarian, and do know something about and study humanitarianism as a result. And I have never heard that it has anything to do with attempting to squeeze inhumanity through the spaces in the words of the common articles in order to argue for a space where humanitarian law does not exist, any more than a Constitutionalist like Glenn believes that the Constitution has something to do with trying to find places like Guantanamo where the law does not exist. Does that make my point of view pretty clear?
I don't think there is a resolution to this debate, you don't want to believe the Geneva Conventions apply to all armed conflict, and those in charge of implementing or ruling on them believe they do. So I'd like, with your kind permission, to be relieved of further debating it.
