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Critics see hypocrisy in US demands that Iraq treat captured soldiers according to Geneva Conventions Jordan Times, 3/27/03 SAN JUAN (AP) — Critics are asking how the United States can demand the protection of the Geneva Conventions for soldiers captured in Iraq while not fully complying in its treatment of “terror” suspects in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The United States is “giving some excuse to the Iraqis” to mistreat prisoners, said Khalid Al Odah, a Kuwaiti whose 25-year-old son has been held in Guantanamo for more than a year without charge or access to a lawyer. “I see that as relatively a double standard,” Al Odah said by telephone Wednesday from Kuwait. He isn't alone in suggesting the US government's position of calling Guantanamo detainees “enemy combatants” and not prisoners of war is contradictory and could backfire. “The administration is looking somewhat hypocritical in the eyes of many people,” said Robert K. Goldman, an expert on the laws of war and professor at American University in Washington. “This issue, sooner or later, was going to come back to haunt us.” The military maintains treatment is humane for some 660 men from 42 countries held on suspicion of links to Al Qaeda terror network or Afghanistan's former Taleban regime. “They're detained because they're considered a threat to the United States,” said Lt. Col. Barry Johnson, a spokesman at Guantanamo. Images of US PoWs on Iraqi television have drawn criticism. But “the US is not in a very good moral or legal position to make this complaint,” said Michael Ratner, a lawyer for relatives of two Australian and two British prisoners. It was the US Department of Defence that published the first pictures of detainees arriving at Guantanamo — arousing outrage even among some friendly governments with images of handcuffed men blinded by blacked-out goggles, wearing ear muffs and surgical masks. Officials first allowed journalists to photograph detainees through chain-link fences but in April moved them to a permanent prison where screens obscure journalists' view. Recognisable photos of faces were never allowed, with the military citing the conventions. On Sunday, Defence Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld noted the Geneva Conventions forbid showing or humiliating PoWs and said it was something the United States does not do. Military officials say photographs of detainees give a distorted view and that they are abiding by most of the Third Geneva Convention of 1949 governing PoW treatment. Officials deny using torture and say detainees are interrogated humanely, allowed to practice their religion and given good medical care. Prisoners released from Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan this month said they were beaten, deprived of sleep or made to stay naked on a sheet of ice. US military coroners also have ruled that two prisoners who died at Bagram were beaten. In Guantanamo, the military moved 20 detainees into a new psychiatric wing Monday for closer observation after a series of suicide attempts. The International Committee of the Red Cross has urged the military to clarify the detainees' legal status, saying each is a PoW unless a tribunal rules otherwise. US officials respond that detainees aren't “lawful” combatants. The conventions say PoWs should be sent home “after the cessation of active hostilities,” but Pentagon spokesman Maj. Ted Wadsworth said when the conflict ends “has yet to be determined.” The conventions also say PoWs should be sentenced in “the same courts” as US soldiers, suggesting courts martial instead of proposed secretive military tribunals. Al Odah, who backed US forces during the 1991 Gulf War and believes his son is innocent, said the 12 Kuwaiti prisoners have missed much back home, including the death of another's father, who suffered a heart attack Tuesday. “The United States government should stick to its principles,” he said. “It is a free country, it is a nation of rule of law — and this is not happening now.”
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