Army Manual to Skip Geneva Detainee Rule

A new army manual produced by the Pentagon has omitted a key tenet of the Geneva Conventions that explicitly bans "humiliating and degrading treatment."

Bush and Co. continue to assert that events like Abu Ghraib are unrelated to their declarations that they will not be bound by Geneva, but when one finds them deliberately removing parts of the Convention from their guidebooks , one can hardly be surprised if US soldiers take this as a tacit signal that the gloves have come off and that former "quaint" rules do not apply.

"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."

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 Bush's order superseded military policy at the time, touching off a wide debate over U.S. obligations under the Geneva accord, a debate that intensified after reports of detainee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.

Among the directives being rewritten following Bush's 2002 order is one governing U.S. detention operations. Military lawyers and other defense officials wanted the redrawn version of the document known as DoD Directive 2310, to again embrace Common Article 3 of the Geneva Convention. That provision - known as a "common" article because it is part of each of the four Geneva pacts approved in 1949 - bans torture and cruel treatment.

Unlike other Geneva provisions, Article 3 covers all detainees - whether they are held as unlawful combatants or traditional prisoners of war. The protections for detainees in Article 3 go beyond the McCain amendment by specifically prohibiting humiliation, treatment that falls short of cruelty or torture.

The move to restore U.S. adherence to Article 3 was opposed by officials from Vice President Dick Cheney's office and by the Pentagon's intelligence arm, government sources said. David S. Addington, Cheney's chief of staff, and Stephen A. Cambone, Defense undersecretary for intelligence, said it would restrict the United States' ability to question detainees.

The Pentagon tried to satisfy some of the military lawyers' concerns by including some protections of Article 3 in the new policy, most notably a ban on inhumane treatment, but refused to embrace the actual Geneva standard in the directive it planned to issue.

The four Geneva Conventions of 1949 and their Additional Protocols are the fundamental instruments of humanitarian law. It is unthinkable that a nation founded on kind of principles that formed the United States of America could even consider not applying them.

The very fact that this discussion is being held at all should be a subject of national disgrace.

As long as Bush and Co. refuse to wholeheartedly embrace the convention, the world will continue to suspect that they do so for sinister reasons.

And one cannot claim to be surprised and shocked, as Bush has done, when your own soldiers behave in a way that is outwith a convention that you, yourself, refuse to endorse.

Bush and Cheney seem to think they are walking some narrow legal line. However, as Derek P. Jinks, an assistant professor at the University of Texas School of Law, points out:

"We are walking the line on the prohibition on cruel treatment," Jinks said. "But are we really in search of the boundary between the cruel and the acceptable?"

Sadly, the answer from both Bush and Cheney, at this moment, appears to be yes.

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