Guantanamo and Abu Graib

"The Bush administration's emerging approach was that America's enemies 
in this war were "unlawful" combatants without rights.   

Originally, Geneva Conventions protections were stripped only from
Qaeda and Taliban prisoners. But later Rumsfeld himself, impressed by
the success of techniques used against Qaeda suspects at Guantanamo
Bay, seemingly set in motion a process that led to their use in Iraq,
even though that war was supposed to have been governed by the Geneva
Conventions. Ultimately, reservist MPs, like those at Abu Ghraib, were
drawn into a system in which fear and humiliation were used to break
prisoners' resistance to interrogation...

And on Jan. 9, 2002, John Yoo of Justice's Office of Legal Counsel
coauthored a sweeping 42-page memo concluding that neither the Geneva
Conventions nor any of the laws of war applied to the conflict in
Afghanistan." 
Newsweek, May 4, 2004

Many of the prisoners held at Abu Graib were not only not terrorists,
most of them were not even ordinary criminals.

A. This is one of the things I call them liars for.    They apply some
notion that terrorists do not have rights to people who they know or
not terrorists and to people for whom they don't know either way.

B. How can they say that people don't have rights?  Why are we
suddenly going against the Geneva convention?  What country is this?

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The "patriot act".  The name sends a shiver down the spine.