When writing for the Opinion section, we columnists have a responsibility that goes beyond opining about a score at a baseball game or the “he said, she said” of political debates. We must write using facts that are beyond reproach. This is key for effective persuasion and complete credibility.

A recent column in The Daily Aztec (“U.S. torture is hypocritical,” April 4) about Ahmed Omar Abu Ali was filled with hyperboles about his alleged coerced confession, his detention and allegations of wrongdoing by U.S. government agents.

Abu Ali was found guilty by a jury for the charges against him, laid out in an indictment, which is little more than a litany of accusations – opinions – made by prosecutors.

The author of the article lamented the fact that the indictment does not prove that Abu Ali was anything other than associated with terrorists. Outside of the fact that the mere association is against federal law, there is the larger problem of using an indictment as proof that one’s conclusion is correct. Indictments are not facts or proof, and prosecutors do not lay out their whole case in an indictment. It is up to a judge and jury to decide what the facts are, and, in this case, the defense tried to persuade those two parties Abu Ali was tortured and illegally detained.

In the end, the defense was unsuccessful, its assertions were rejected, and the jury and judge determined that the government prosecutors had proved their case – a fact that went unnoticed by the author.

An opinion writer cannot simply ignore the facts because they do not mesh with his or her point of view.

According to the column, other U.S. citizens and foreigners are also illegally detained and tortured. The author claimed that “prisoners of war” (who are, in fact, detainees) are protected under the Geneva Convention. They are not.

This is troubling, and for the sake of clarity about this issue, all the author needed to do was take a look at the Geneva Convention stipulations to see for whom it applies and when.

A quick primer: to be a “prisoner of war,” a combatant must be fighting in uniform for a country. al-Qaida and those sympathetic to it are in no way a nation. Such people are simply international gangs whose members behead people they catch on the battlefield and do not qualify for Geneva Convention protections.

Many people want to feel sorry for Abu Ali – who received a trial and a lawyer at U.S. taxpayers’ expense – when our own servicemen and women and citizens are burned, dragged through streets or beheaded by members of al-Qaida when they’re captured.

Frequently, arguments based on misinterpretations of the Geneva Convention are used to imply that America should not be at war at all. The suggested alternative is for the United States to go the United Nations and demand that the international community force members of al-Qaida to answer for violating the international conventions against hijackings. This is impossible and absurd, but it has become a popular sentiment among Americans who oppose present U.S. foreign policy.

An author writing an opinion column cannot rely on gut feeling and certainly not on others’ opinions to form conclusions. The notion that Americans are torturing people and that detainees are prisoners of war is nothing more than an attempt to make fact from fiction.

Even more baffling is the belief that Abu Ali just happened to be “hanging out” with terrorists and did not know it. He has spent years in the company of known terrorists and expected a jury to believe that all he ever discussed with them were innocuous topics and never anything such as Jihad.

It’s also wise to remember that conventions’ laws authored by the United Nations are signed by countries, not by individuals or terrorist groups. So, being caught on the battlefield does not automatically make a combatant a beneficiary of any protections, just as being an American citizen does not afford on any U.S. Constitutional right while he or she is in a foreign nation. If you don’t believe this, go to Saudi Arabia and try to practice Judaism, or hold a public protest against the House of Saud.

We must be cautious in writing opinion columns. Recently, even the venerated New York Times was forced to apologize after writing about an alleged victim from Abu Ghraib. The story was full of torture and drama and read like a Tom Clancy book, but it was all the fantasy of an alleged victim. An elaborate hoax that made the front pages and editorial section was printed when fact checking could have caught it, according to www.guardian.co.uk. Obviously, this happened because editors at the New York Times failed to adequately check the facts of the story.

The lesson to be learned here is that journalists must never ignore facts because they want to believe their own opinions.

-Steve Yuhas is a homeland security graduate student.

-This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of The Daily Aztec. Send e-mail to letters@thedailyaztec.com. Anonymous letters will not be printed – include your full name, major and year in school.