Leadership Quote by Bill Shuster

The sentence performs a moral sleight of hand: it claims the high ground for humane treatment while simultaneously arguing that humane treatment is optional. Shuster wraps an exception to the rules in the language of rule-following, banking political credit for decency and then cashing it out as permission to ignore it.

“However” does the heavy lifting, framing Geneva compliance as an act of restraint against an implied temptation to do worse. The phrase “even though that is not required” is the tell: it smuggles in a contested legal thesis (that certain detainees fall outside Geneva protections) as if it were settled fact, shifting the argument from law to deservedness. Calling them “detainees” keeps a bureaucratic distance, but “these killers” yanks the reader back into visceral certainty. The label isn’t descriptive; it’s prosecutorial. It discourages questions about due process, mistaken identity, or the category problems that defined post-9/11 detention.

The most revealing move is the conditional humanity: we treat them well, but only because we choose to, not because they have rights. That subtext matters because it reframes international law from a binding constraint into a discretionary gesture, something a powerful state can grant or withdraw based on the enemy’s conduct. Geneva becomes a trophy, not a framework.

In context, this echoes the early-to-mid War on Terror rhetoric that tried to square American self-image with exceptional measures: indefinite detention, “unlawful combatant” categories, and the notion that an adversary’s brutality licenses our flexibility. It’s less a defense policy statement than a narrative about American virtue under provocation.