Are you insinuating the term "unlawful combatant" only appeared during the WOT?
...the distinction between lawful and unlawful enemy combatants (also referred to as “unprivileged belligerents”) has deep roots in international humanitarian law, preceding even the 1949 Geneva Conventions. The Hague Regulations of 1899 and 1907 contemplated distinctions between lawful and unlawful combatants, and this distinction remains to this day.As Professor Adam Roberts told the Brookings Speakers Forum in March 2002, “There is a long record of certain people coming into the category of unlawful combatants— pirates, spies, saboteurs, and so on. It has been absurd that there should have been a debate about whether or not that category exists.”
“Are you insinuating the term “unlawful combatant” only appeared during the WOT?”
I did reply to this but can’t find the reply. How odd.
Anyway: of course I’m not. Being a Brit I know the concept goes back hundreds of years, and was applied to captured longbowmen as well as captured spies in our battles with France. To wit, they’d be tortured for information and then despatched in particularly gruesome fashions as a warning to other people who weren’t “playing by the rules” (i.e. who were playing hard to get instead of dressing up in identifiable colours and fighting man-to-man with swords).
As for treating terrorists as “unlawful combatants”, we did have Guido Fawkes. Once we got the intel, we despatched him in a gruesome way, to serve as a warning to others.
The point I’m trying to get at, is that “unlawful combatants” only ever means one of two things: “enemy combatants we want to make a public example of” (a bit naughty), and “enemy combatants we want to torture for information because we need to know what they know” (more justifiable).
You can pretend all you like that there’s ever been anything substantially more to the terminology than that, but there really isn’t.
The German Army rulebooks said that shooting unarmed POWs in reprisals wasn’t (technically) allowed, but the very same rule books said that it was okay to shoot spies. So what did the Nazis do when they recaptured escaped POWs? Look at what they were wearing. If they were in civilian garb, to evade capture, then they could be shot as spies, and made an example of.
In South Park, there’s a running gag where Ned and Jimbo know they’re not supposed to shoot certain wild animals at certain times of the year but get around that restriction by shouting “They’re coming right for us!” and claiming self defense. Same concept, different context.