IT IS NOT WISE to place yourself between a Stinger missile and its target. So, normally, I wouldn't dare stand in the way when the great Mark Steyn goes on the attack. But, like a lot of conservatives, he was so irritated by the Supreme Court's decision in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld that he fired a bit wildly in a recent column.

It is not true that the Court's ruling, invoking a provision of the Geneva Convention on prisoners of war, gives terrorists "all the benefits with none of the obligations" set down in the convention. It's not even true that to reach the result it did, the Court had to "stand the Conventions on their head" and "give words the precise opposite of their plain meaning and intent."

And it's certainly not true that the ruling has thrown a great legal obstacle in the general path of Bush administration policy. But a defensible ruling can still be a mistake, as I think this one was.

The 1949 Geneva Convention offers protections for prisoners of war who satisfy certain conditions. According to Article 4, only those prisoners qualify who, before their capture, were accountable to a formal command structure, wore some sort of identifying uniform or insignia, carried arms openly, and respected the laws of war in their own military operations. For these prisoners, the convention then sets out a very detailed set of rights and protections, taking nearly 150 articles to enumerate them all. One purpose is to restrain captors from trying

At the outset, however, Article 3 stipulates that in "case of armed conflict not of an international character," states that adhere to the con vention are still bound to respect certain "minimum . . . provisions." These include prohibitions on the "murder" and "mutilation" of prisoners, on "outrages upon [their] personal dignity," and on "the passing of sentences . . . without previous judgment pronounced by a regularly constituted court."

It was not at all a stretch for the Supreme Court to conclude that these protections should apply to al Qaeda suspects at Guantánamo. Since al Qaeda is not a state or nation, the conflict in which they were captured was very reasonably characterized as "not of an international character." Anyway, the United States has never claimed a right to inflict "murder" and "mutilation" on Gitmo detainees--though it does want the chance to grant and withhold certain amenities to pump prisoners for more information than "name, rank and date of birth," which is all that lawful POWs are required to provide.

The catch is in the interpretation. Who gets to decide the precise implications of Article 3? The issue in Hamdan was the construction of the vaguely worded prohibition against imposing sentences on prisoners without "affording all the judicial guarantees which are recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples." The Pentagon had proposed somewhat streamlined procedures for the trial of suspects at Guantánamo by special military commissions. Did this approach violate the requirements of Article 3?