I never thought there would be anything that President G.W. Bush and I would agree upon. But maybe it is time to re-think the Third Geneva Conventions -- the treaty dealing with the treatment of prisoners of war. Maybe its rules really are quaint and out of date.

Signed by some 40 nations in July 1929, the conventions, for the first time, spelled out in plain language how nations at war were to treat captured enemy. It also stipulated that if one of the nations at war had signed the treaty and the other had not, they were both still obligated to uphold the treaty.

The United States was home to over 400,000 Axis POWs from late 1942 to early 1947. They were held in 660 camps throughout the nation -- 220 in the upper Midwest, 11 in Minnesota. Outside of Texas, no state had more camps than Wisconsin.

No POWs have been treated so well, before or since. The U.S. military was determined to uphold not only the letter of the conventions but the spirit as well. Our treatment of the German POWs was an island of humanity in the ocean of inhumanity that was World War II.

They were treated so well and liked America and Americans so much that about 30,000 of them came back to the U.S. after the war and became citizens.

Germany had signed the conventions. Japan had not, but was still obligated to follow it. They did not. Of the 40,000 American troops captured in the Pacific theater, only 10,000, or 25 percent, survived. In Europe 81,000 out of 90,000 Americans captured survived, 90 percent.

Hitler thought 10 percent of the U.S. was Jewish so he had a standing order that 10 percent of all American POWs were to be sent to concentration camps. Only one German POW camp commander ever obeyed that order. Three hundred American soldiers wound up in Auschwitz for between two weeks and a month (eyewitness accounts vary) before a Luftwaffe officer got them out.

Except for that one commander, no commander of a German POW camp was tried for violating the Geneva Conventions at the post-war trials in Nuremberg. Conversely, every commander of a Japanese POW camp was tried and convicted of violating the conventions at the Tokyo war crimes trials.

These were the only two instances in history when the 1929 conventions have been followed, and the consequences for not following them meted out. In every war since then, no nations have followed the dictates of the treaty and no individual has ever been held responsible for violating them.

Now we find ourselves in a war with not one nation but a loose conglomeration of people bent on wreaking havoc anyway they can. This is something the Geneva Conventions did not foresee or address. Terrorists have no code of honor or ethics to follow -- the very antithesis of the Conventions. So how do we deal with them?

Torture has never worked as a fruitful intelligence-gathering tool. But are we under any obligation to treat terrorists humanely? They certainly show no mercy to their victims.

But in acting like our enemy do we become him?

Our country has killed people without trials in this new age, with the war on terror forcing us to be judge, jury and executioner in one.

If we had captured Bin Laden to hold for trial, some terrorists somewhere in the world might have attacked a hotel and taken all the guests as hostages and then started killing them until he was released, forcing that country's government to retake the hotel with untold bloodshed.

This is what terrorists do. It is the new type of warfare we have to learn to deal with. The 1929 Geneva Conventions don't.

The Geneva Conventions need to be reworked and updated for this new type of warfare, if that is even possible. Then again, maybe it is a noble experiment whose time has come and gone.

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Irving Kellman, of St. Paul, is assistant director of Traces Center, a WWII history museum focusing on the treatment of American and German POWs.