22 October 2004	Friday	07 Ramazan 1425

WASHINGTON, Oct 21: Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry has said that if elected, he would apply the Geneva Conventions to all prisoners captured in the "war on terror".

Mr Kerry made this commitment in a statement he sent to the Washington Post which had asked both Mr Kerry and President George W. Bush to explain how they intended to deal with these prisoners.

"A Kerry administration will apply the Geneva Conventions to all battlefield combatants captured in the war on terror," the statement said.

President George W. Bush, however, continues to take the position that the Geneva Conventions should not be applied to many detainees, including anyone captured in Afghanistan, and that harsh interrogation techniques should be used on some of these prisoners.

In the past, Mr Kerry had criticized the Bush administration's interrogation techniques saying that the decision led to the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib ad other places but had not taken a stand on the Geneva Conventions.

The commitment he made in response to the Post' s queries shows an important new distinction between the two presidential candidates on a major issue.

Mr Bush's decision in February 2002 to ignore the Geneva Conventions is seen in America as one of the most damaging mistakes of his presidency. Human rights groups blamed this decision for the imprisonment of hundreds of foreigners at Guantanamo Bay without any legal process. Earlier this year, the US Supreme Court set aside Mr Bush' s decision and ordered that Guantanamo prisoners be accorded a fair trial.

Critics of the Bush administration also blame Mr Bush for allowing his Defence Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to authorize the use of harsh interrogation techniques that are illegal under the Geneva Conventions. Recent investigations by various US agencies found that the techniques introduced in Guantanamo were later also used by US field units in Iraq and Afghanistan, leading to hundreds of cases of torture, homicide and other abuses.

But in their response to the Post, the Bush administration refused to acknowledge its decision to set aside the Geneva Conventions led to these terrible consequences. In a letter to the Post, Mr Rumsfeld's spokesman, Lawrence Di Rita, claimed that no policy or decision made by a senior official had anything to do with the abuses at Abu Ghraib. To bolster his case, he cites official investigations but the Post pointed out these, in fact, had proven the opposite. For example, Gen. Paul J. Kern, whom Mr Di Rita quotes, testified to Congress last month that techniques approved by Mr Rumsfeld in December 2002 - including nudity, painful stress positions and the use of dogs to incite fear - "found their way into documentation that we found in Abu Ghraib."

The Schlesinger commission, also cited by Mr Di Rita, determined that Iraq commander Lt-Gen Ricardo S. Sanchez approved similar practices, "using reasoning from the President's memorandum" of 2002. It also concluded, "There is both institutional and personal responsibility at higher levels" for the crimes at Abu Ghraib.

But Mr Kerry assured the Post that his administration will operate according to the same international standards that it wishes to see applied to its own service members and citizens. "We will abide by a principle long enshrined in our military manuals," says the Kerry statement: "That America does not treat prisoners in ways we would consider immoral and illegal if perpetrated by the enemy on Americans."

That strikes us as a policy that is both more in keeping with American standards, and more likely to be successful in practice, than that pursued with such disastrous results by Mr Bush, said the Post while commenting on the two positions on this issue.