AT THE OUTSET of the Algerian Revolution, a terrorist named Ramdane Abane declared, "One corpse in a suit is always worth more than 20 in uniform." Ironically, about a half-century later, the fatalities in the buildings attacked on Sept. 11 reflected very closely a 20:1 ratio: Some 2,602 civilians perished at the World Trade Center, while 125 uniformed service members and Defense Department workers died at the Pentagon. The heirs of Ramdane Abane, to put it mildly, disregard the Geneva Conventions, which aim, not wholly oxymoronically, to civilize war. Should their ilk then enjoy Geneva's protections?

Any rational reading of the pacts makes clear that the answer is "no." Article 2 of the Third Geneva Convention, on the treatment of prisoners, states that the convention binds only the 194 nations that have signed the document. Terrorists are not a nation. Even if they were, and had adopted the protocols, gross breaches of the rules remove the obligation of signatory nations to observe them vis-à-vis the violator.

If terrorists, despite their stateless status, accepted the norms of Geneva, a strong moral case would exist for covering them with Geneva's aegis. But for that to happen, terrorists would have to stop targeting civilians. They would have to stop mutilating and murdering prisoners. They would have to wear uniforms and carry their arms openly (no suicide vests). In short, they would have to stop being terrorists, who are the antitheses of what Geneva expects in combatants. The only amenity for which a captured terrorist can reasonably hope is a well-place bullet--what General Nguyen Ngoc Loan in 1968 on the streets of Saigon notoriously dealt an undercover Viet Cong assassin, the blood of an innocent family fresh on his hands.

However, in a curious June ruling in the case of Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, a bare Supreme Court majority decided that unlawful enemy combatants, as prisoners, enjoy immunity from "grave" breaches of the Third Convention's Common Article 3, which prohibits "outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment." But Article 3 covers conflicts only "within a signatory's territory" and "not of an international character." Virtually all such combatants in U.S. custody were captured abroad, and if al-Qaida's operations are not "international," why isn't the nation sleeping better at night? Curious indeed.