LONDON: Imagine the scene. A group of alleged Irish terrorists is seized and handed over to the British Government by a third country. They are held without access to any lawyers. Some are threatened by interrogating intelligence officers. They are told that if they do not tell them what they want to know then they might simply ‘disappear’. Some of the men are tortured while being held in prison and forced into confessing that they are members of a terrorist organisation.

These men are drugged and bound and then flown out of the country to an island camp, where lawyers are appointed for them but where the normal guarantees of defendants’ rights do not apply. Those lawyers cannot appeal for their release - no mechanism exists - nor can they challenge their extradition or the criteria for it.

In that island camp, they will face an emergency military tribunal that has the right to kill them. Confronted with these gross violations, the international media and human rights organisations would rightly be up in arms in protest.

On Saturday, a group of men, whose names and nationalities we do not even know, completed a journey identical in almost every detail to the one described above. Manacled, with some sedated, they were chained to their seats in the aircraft that delivered them. The difference is that this group of 20 men were alleged terrorists with the Taliban and Al Qaeda and their destination was the US base at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. The difference, too, is that what complaint there has been about their treatment has been curiously muted.

The reality of what is happening to the prisoners of Afghanistan is a scandal of international proportions. Brutalised, often tortured, these are men who have been stripped of their most basic rights under international and US law, rights guaranteed at the International Tribunal in the Hague even for the alleged architects of the genocide in Yugoslavia and Rwanda.

In a few deft strokes, the administration of President George W. Bush has dropped a ‘daisycutter’ not only on the Geneva Conventions, designed to protect the rights of prisoners of war, but also America’s own constitutional guarantees for defendants. It is possible, even likely, that many of these people committed terrible crimes - some many even have had foreknowledge of the attacks of Sept 11 - but their special treatment presupposes a special guilt.

They are the kind of people, we are assured, after all, by General Richard B. Myers, US Chief of the Joint Staffs, who are so ‘dangerous that they would gnaw through the hydraulic cables’ on their transport plane to bring it down. It is a description appropriate to an animal, not to a man.

What is most alarming are the potential consequences of those beaten and forced confessions in the context of the legal process that has been constructed for the Al Qaeda prisoners. For the torture, threats and humiliation of the Taliban and Al Qaeda prisoners in Afghanistan’s jails pale into insignificance before the cynical acrobatics that Geroge Bush’s administration has gone through to strip these prisoners of their most basic rights to a fair legal process.

Let us start with the Geneva Conventions. Not the obvious stuff like the proscriptions on summary executions (witnessed across the country as the Taliban fell), or torture (see above), or the humiliating and degrading treatment (parading prisoners for the international media), but the niggly details of legal process.

Details like the proscription on the handing-over of prisoners of war to a third party that is not a party to the war, which America insists implausibly to the International Committee for the Red Cross that it is not; in other words, the US claims that it is merely assisting the anti-Taliban forces rather than prosecuting a war.

So if the prisoners of Guantanamo Bay are not criminals or combatants, what are they? They are the examples that America feels it needs to make before the world, condemned before the fact by their alleged membership of a criminal association. They are triply damned, one suspects, by their nationality, religion and the colour of their skins. —Dawn/The Observer News Service.