Steve Madden

According to the Geneva convention, to be entitled to prisoner of war status, the captured service member "must have conducted operations according to the laws and customs of war: be part of a chain of command and wear a uniform and bear arms openly."

That's what it actually says, not what we would wish it to say.

One of the countries that insisted on this qualification was Afghanistan.

If a SAS member is caught out of uniform in enemy territory he would not have to be accorded POW status.

Leo Lane: "Constantly repeated lies are eventually believed"

Well yes - but the electorate eventually wakes up and votes the incumbent bulldust artists out. This is of course the very situation which the Lying Rodent and his cohorts currently face in the lead-up to the next election.

I don't expect that the inevitable Rudd Labor government will ultimately be much less mendacious, but at least they'll be slightly different kinds of lies.

Leo Lane, with your whines against Hicks and an imaginary Left, you sound more and more no better than the Bush, Blair, plus Howard nut cases now trying to straighten out Iraq - us cases just trying to prove that each is not much better

When the tide brings in a swarm of jellyfish, the only thing to do is get out of the water.
BM's rehash of the same old spin has attracted some frankly lunatic defenders (no surprise), but i don't think even the most sane and engageable of his supporters will ever see a fascist abuse of power they don't like (until it hurts them personally). Jesus wept.

At least BM is prepared to go against the tide of popular reporting on David Hicks. Why not stir the pot? It beats the constant "Hug-a-Hicks" campaign in our neo-tabloid papers.

Steve,you are a dreamer. Any one who adverts to past experience, knows what would happen to a member of the SAS captured by the Taliban. There would be no advertance to the Geneva convention, in or out of uniform.

In any event, I have set out the law which applies, as against the misinformation given by Hicks supporters. You dance around that in a most ineffectual way, putting up no argument other than a fanciful, and inapplicable supposition.

Even FrankGol, sticks to a format of facts , now, but bushbred has supplied another pure specimen of incoherent lefty abuse, with no trace of fact or debate. If he was bush bred, he must have spent a lot of his later life subjected to brain addling, in Glebe or Balmain, to counteract his breeding.

CJMorgan does not realize that Howard is the first truthful Prime Minister since Gorton, but a leftie would not know the difference. A less kind interpretation is that the assertion is part of a typical campaign of the left to label an honest man a liar.