I don't think the administration's civilian lawyers, in the first flush after 9-11, understood that their professional military lawyers were not saying that captured Al Qaeda would be POWs, but instead merely that if the administration treated the attack as war, then the overall regime of the laws of war of course applied - with the result that under GC3, Al Qaeda would turn out to be unprivileged belligerents or unlawful combatants. [read post]