International law an enemy combatant?

Australian David Hicks is the first of the prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay to be tried. His trial began today, after five years of imprisonment at the isolated US military base in Cuba. He is charged with "providing material support for terrorism by fighting for al Qaeda in Afghanistan." I believe that Hicks' trial, like that of "American Taliban" John Walker Lindh, is unjust and that the Bush Administration is violating both American and international law in the way they are holding opposition fighters captured from Afghanistan and Iraq.

Though the administration dreamed up the designation "enemy combatants," these are unquestionably prisoners of war, and there is an accepted and legal way for dealing with such captives: the Geneva Conventions. Prisoners are held in humane conditions until the end of the war and then they are released to their home country. Only those who have committed atrocities are tried, and that should be done before international war tribunals. It is not illegal to fight for your country or your cause, and American law does not apply on foreign battlefields.

I am not defending terrorists or the Taliban, but the US does not have the right to stomp around the world and apply our own criteria when there are laws and there is a format. I would have no problem with John Walker Lindh having his US citizenship stripped from him and banishing him from America for good as a consequence for fighting against our military, but he was a foreign fighter when captured and should have been treated according to established conventions, as should the rest of the fighters. Once Kabul fell, the actual war in Afghanistan was over. Time to release the prisoners. In Iraq, Baghdad's fall was the end of Saddam's reign, and anyone held from the Iraqi army should have been let go.

If there is any evidence that those people were part of terrorist plots they should be tried according to the laws they violated in countries where the terrorist actions took place. Either one is charged by a war-crimes tribunal or by the domestic laws of a country; otherwise, they are prisoners of war and must be released. Guantanamo Bay is intentionally outside of US law, outside of Cuban law and, according to the Bush Administration, outside of international law. Such a policy is not just illegal, but it is immoral as well.