Generally, human rights standards apply to everybody, and not just to the people who respect them. That's the point I was trying to make initially. You don't have to go as far as al-Qaeda; you can look at Omar Khadr's own family. They did not respect his rights as a child; they viewed him as an adult combatant from the age of 12, but that's not our standard.
Simply because other people reject human rights doesn't give us a licence to reject their human rights. We're not doing this just for them; we're doing it for all of humanity and ourselves. We say we are not going to degrade ourselves, our standards, and our view of humanity simply because other people have these degrading views. So to me that's not a persuasive argument whatsoever.