Julian E. Barnes reports that the Pentagon and State Department are fighting over the Army's intent to drop a ban of "prisoner humuliation" from the Code of Conduct.
Army Manual to Skip Geneva Detainee Rule
The Pentagon has decided to omit from new detainee policies a key tenet of the Geneva Convention that explicitly bans "humiliating and degrading treatment," according to knowledgeable military officials, a step that would mark a further, potentially permanent, shift away from strict adherence to international human rights standards.
What the heck?
Incredible Lack Of Timing
Does anyone else think that at the very least, this announcement demonstrates an incredibly bad sense of timing by the Pentagon, if not outright stupidity? We are skirting as close as can be imagined to being indicted for war crimes by the rest of the world which is watching in horror at our actions in Iraq. Now the Pentagon want to loosen the rule? Mind boggling!
The State Department fiercely opposes the military's decision to exclude Geneva Convention protections and has been pushing for the Pentagon and White House to reconsider, the Defense Department officials acknowledged.
For more than a year, the Pentagon has been redrawing its policies on detainees, and intends to issue a new Army Field Manual on interrogation, which, along with accompanying directives, represents core instructions to U.S. soldiers worldwide.
The process has been beset by debate and controversy, and the decision to omit Geneva protections from a principal directive comes at a time of growing worldwide criticism of U.S. detention practices and the conduct of American forces in Iraq.
Good for the State Department. Remember them? At least in the non-political civilian component, these are the same folks that expressed caution about by passing the UN Charter which makes it a violation of international law to go to war without the endorsement of the UN Security Council. Which Bush did not get.
Is The Bush Administration's Opposition To The Geneva Accord Causing Hathida and Related Crimes?"
But the Bush Administration's repeated denigration of the Geneva Conventions are one fundemental cause of the many incidents such as Abu Ghraib, as well as the alleged many war crimes at Falluja, Haditha, as many other places. We can continue to jail privates. But this article reminds of where ultimate responsibility belongs.
President Bush's critics and supporters have debated whether it is possible to prove a direct link between administration declarations that it will not be bound by Geneva and events such as the abuses at Abu Ghraib or the killings of Iraqi civilians last year in Haditha, allegedly by Marines.
But the exclusion of the Geneva provisions may make it more difficult for the administration to portray such incidents as aberrations. And it undercuts contentions that U.S. forces follow the strictest, most broadly accepted standards when fighting wars.
"The rest of the world is completely convinced that we are busy torturing people," said Oona A. Hathaway, an expert in international law at Yale Law School. "Whether that is true or not, the fact we keep refusing to provide these protections in our formal directives puts a lot of fuel on the fire."
Bush Administration's Radicle Departure From Geneva Conventions
My opinion is that we see the real first cause of Abu Ghraib, Haditha, and other US brutalities against Iraqi civilians and prisoners of war in the Bush Administrations 2002 renunciation of the Genevea Accords.
For decades, it had been the official policy of the U.S. military to follow the minimum standards for treating all detainees as laid out in the Geneva Convention. But, in 2002, Bush suspended portions of the Geneva Convention for captured Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters. Bush's order superseded military policy at the time, touching off a wide debate over U.S. obligations under the Geneva accord, a debate that intensified after reports of detainee abuses at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison..
That the Pentagon should be trying to further remove Geneva Convention from it training manuals right at the time the evidence from Haditha and Abu Ghraib indicate they should be adding more of it back in as a sad symptom of how much they just don't get about what is going on.
I hope the State Department stands its ground and the Senate Oversight Armed Service Committee and others intervene on behalf of international law and basic human decency.