Pentagon to respect Geneva Convention: Policy shift on treatment of prisoners
WASHINGTON, Sept 6: The Pentagon on Wednesday issued a new policy statement explicitly requiring US military staff to respect the Geneva Conventions’ standards for treatment of prisoners held in its ‘war on terror’.
“It is DOD (Department of Defence) policy that: All detainees shall be treated humanely and in accordance with US law, the law of war and applicable US policy,” the directive reads.
“All persons subject to this directive shall observe the requirements of the law of war, and shall apply, without regard to a detainee’s legal status, at a minimum the standards articulated in Common Article 3 to the Geneva Conventions of 1949,” it adds.
Article 3 requires humane treatment of people detained during an armed conflict and forbids ‘cruel treatment and torture’ and ‘outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment’.
The policy is a switch for the administration which for years held that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to those fighting for the Taliban, Al Qaeda or other presumed terror groups.
It applies to prisoners under the authority of the Defence Department, said Bryan Whitman, a department spokesman. That means it does not apply to detainees held by CIA agents in secret prisons overseas.
The change came after the US Supreme Court ruled that the special military commissions established by the administration violated US and international law.
In July, Deputy Defence Secretary Gordon England made public an internal memo instructing military officials to treat prisoners from the ‘war on terror’, in accordance with the standards of Article 3.
Though it argued that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to terror detainees, the administration of George Bush has always insisted that it respected the human rights of detainees at the Guantanamo Bay prison.
PROHIBITIONS: Following are details of the tactics outlawed in the Pentagon’s new Army Field Manual.
Interrogators may not:
— use hoods or place sacks over a detainee’s head or use duct tape over his or her eyes
— beat or electrically shock or burn detainees or inflict other forms of physical pain
— use “water boarding,” which simulates drowning
— perform mock executions
— deprive detainees of necessary food, water and medical care
— use dogs in any aspect of interrogations.
Interrogators may:
— engage in ‘Mutt and Jeff’, or good-cop, bad-cop interrogation tactics
— use ‘false flag’, portraying themselves as someone other than American interrogators
— use ‘separation’ to keep unlawful enemy combatants apart from each other so that they can not coordinate their stories. This technique can be used only with ‘unlawful enemy Combatants’, not traditional prisoners of war, and requires special, high-level approval. The Pentagon said separation ‘does not mean solitary confinement’. —AFP/Reuters
