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It is even more difficult to condemn West for violating the standards of the Geneva Convention for warfare and occupation when more senior U.S. officials are themselves treating those rules as inconvenient guidelines that can be ignored at will. The hundreds of prisoners captured in Afghanistan and held under harsh conditions by the United States in Guantanamo Bay, for example, have been ruled ineligible for protection under the Geneva Convention because they are supposedly "enemy combatants" rather than prisoners of war.

What a jackass statement. In order for the Geneva convention to apply, the captured must at the least: A) Be uniformed so as to distinguish between from the civilian popuplation B) Be in service to a State C) Not operate deliberabtely amongst a civilian population. The captured a GITMO have no right to Geneva convention treatment because they first violate almost all the rules for being treated as prisoners of war unlike the American soldiers captured in Vietnam. To refer to the situations as analogous is loathesome. To refer to the US distinction as an "excuse" is ignorant. The Geneva convention is supposed to provide a motivation for soldiers not to descend into utter barbarism by providing the incentive of civilized treatment if captured if they have followed certain rules. If those who disregard those rules are treated exactly the same as those who don't, that incentive disappears.

The United States is thus actually giving meaning to the Geneva convection by making this distinction.

LTC West is not being charged with breach of Geneva Conventions, he failed to follow orders regarding treatment of prisoners. As a result he is being charged with assault.

You are only confusing the situation by not looking to the basic breach of discipline, and that is all he is charged with.

The captured a GITMO have no right to Geneva convention treatment because they first violate almost all the rules for being treated as prisoners of war unlike the American soldiers captured in Vietnam. To refer to the situations as analogous is loathesome. To refer to the US distinction as an "excuse" is ignorant. The Geneva convention is supposed to provide a motivation for soldiers not to descend into utter barbarism by providing the incentive of civilized treatment if captured if they have followed certain rules. If those who disregard those rules are treated exactly the same as those who don't, that incentive disappears.

BIG BUMP!

Subtleties such as these are lost, I fear, on some rulebound members of the "new army". Robots who need to be told where to sit, and when to eat, and when to...

In his innumerable books and articles Victor Davis Hansen has identified (over and over again) initiative and ruthlessness as the characteristics of the "Western" way of war from ancient Greece to the present, and is precisely why western civilization is preeminent today.
The very civilization that allows the marginally competent to wax poetic about "rules" being the end in themselves.