Prisoners' protection questioned

0 Comments | Oakland Tribune, May 23, 2004 | by Douglas Jehl

In testimony last week on Capitol Hill, Col. Marc Warren, a top U.S. military lawyer in Iraq, defended harsh techniques available to American interrogators there as not being in violation of the Geneva Conventions.

He said the conventions should be read in light of "various legal treatises and interpretations of coercion as applied to security internees."

Exactly how the treatment of security prisoners would differ from others under the military's approach was not spelled out in detail, but clearly it would allow their segregation into a separate part of the prison for interrogation, where some of them could be held incommunicado.

The military's letter promised to try to improve prisoners' treatment in some respects cited by the Red Cross, promising, for example, to provide shelters against mortar and rocket attacks "in due course" but noting that the shelters are in short supply for American and allied soldiers.

It also said "improvement can be made" to provide adequate clothing and water, and promised speedier judgments and discharges of innocent prisoners.

The letter is addressed to Eva Svoboda of the Red Cross committee, who is identified as the agency's "protection coordinator."

It asserts that the prisoners at Camp Cropper "have been assessed to be of significant ongoing intelligence value to current and future military operations in Iraq."

"Their detention condition is in the context of ongoing strategic interrogation," it said, and "under the circumstances, we consider their detention to be humane."

The Red Cross report said that at the time of the October visits to Abu Ghraib, "a total of 601 detainees were held as security detainees."

"Many were unaware of any charges against them or what legal process might be ahead of them," the undated report said.

Silliman, a former Air Force lawyer who heads the Center on Law, Ethics and National Security at Duke, said the response of authorities at Abu Ghraib to the Red Cross appeared to be part of a larger pattern in which the administration and the military devote great energy to find ways to avoid the jurisdiction of the Geneva Conventions.

"If you look at this in connection with other things that are coming out, it doesn't seem like a snap decision but part of an across-the-board pattern of decision-making to create another category outside the conventions."

He cited a memorandum written in January 2002 by Albert R. Gonzales, the White House counsel, recommending that President Bush decree that the Geneva Conventions do not apply to prisoners from the war in Afghanistan.

In the memorandum, Gonzales said that getting out from under the restrictions of the Geneva Conventions would preserve the government's flexibility in fighting terrorism.