But State Department objects to removal of protection from degrading treatment
By Julian E. Barnes
June 5, 2006
Washington — The Pentagon has decided to omit from new detainee policies a key tenet of the Geneva Convention that bans “humiliating and degrading treatment,” according to military officials, a step that would mark a potentially permanent shift away from strict adherence to international human rights standards.
The decision culminates a lengthy debate within the Department of Defense, but will not become final until the Pentagon makes new guidelines public, a step that has been delayed.
However, the State Department fiercely opposes the military’s decision to exclude Geneva Convention protections and has been pushing for the Pentagon and White House to reconsider, Defense officials acknowledged.
For more than a year, the Pentagon has been redrawing policies on detainees and interrogation, and intends to issue a new Army Field Manual, which, along with accompanying directives, represents core instructions to U.S. soldiers worldwide.
The process has been beset by debate and controversy, but the decision to omit Geneva Convention protections from a principal directive comes at a time of growing worldwide criticism of U.S. detention practices and the conduct of American forces in Iraq.
The directive on interrogations, a senior Defense official said, is being rewritten to create safeguards so that detainees are treated humanely but can still be questioned effectively.
President Bush’s critics and supporters have debated whether it is possible to prove a direct link between administration declarations that it will not be bound by Geneva and events such as the abuses at Abu Ghraib or the killings of civilians last year at Haditha, Iraq, allegedly by U.S. Marines. But the exclusion of the Geneva provisions may make it more difficult for the administration to portray such incidents as aberrations.
The detainee directive was due to be released in April along with the Army Field Manual on interrogations. But objections from several senators on other Field Manual issues forced a delay. Senators objected to provisions allowing harsher interrogation techniques for unlawful combatants, such as suspected terrorists, as opposed to traditional prisoners of war.
The lawmakers argue that differing standards of treatment allowed by the Field Manual would violate a broadly supported anti-torture measure advanced by Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. McCain last year pushed Congress to ban torture and cruel treatment and to establish the Army Field Manual as the uniform standard for treatment of all detainees. Despite administration opposition, the measure passed and became law.
For decades, it was the official policy of the U.S. military to follow minimum standards for treating detainees as laid out in the Geneva Convention. But, in 2002, President Bush suspended portions of the Geneva Convention for captured al Qaeda and Taliban fighters.
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 to again embrace Common Article 3 of the Geneva Convention. The protections for detainees in Article 3 go beyond the McCain amendment by prohibiting humiliation, treatment that falls short of cruelty or torture. However, the move to restore U.S. adherence to Article 3 was opposed by Vice President Dick Cheney’s office and by the Pentagon’s intelligence arm, government sources said.
Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff told New York to drop dead yesterday as he slashed the city’s federal anti-terror funding in a traitorous action that endangers the lives of 8 million people and demands his immediate firing.
Chertoff’s decision to cut the flow of U.S. money by 40% was at the least gross incompetence and at the worst vengeful payback by a petty bureaucrat who tangled last year with the NYPD and wound up humiliated. Either way, President Bush must give Chertoff the boot with a hearty, “Heck of a job, Mikey.”
This city, America’s No. 1 target, had to fight long and hard for federal terror aid while Congress doled out the money as pork rather than based on threat. That was supposed to change this year because Chertoff was given the power to allocate much of the funding based on where it was needed most. Instead, fresh from monumentally bungling the U.S. response to Hurricane Katrina, he went out of his way to whack New York’s slice of the national pie from $208 million to $124 million. The No. 2 target, Washington, also took a huge hit from Chertoff’s team.
Homeland Security’s rationale for stabbing the city in the back, as Rep. Pete King put it, was based on figments of the imagination and outright lies, all recorded in black and white on the score sheet used by the department for determining which cities got funding. By Chertoff’s reckoning, New York has not a single national monument or icon that needs special security. No Ground Zero. No Empire State Building. No New York Stock Exchange. No Federal Reserve Bank. No St. Patrick’s Cathedral. No Statue of Liberty. No nothing.
Even more outrageous, Chertoff concluded that New York’s Police and Fire departments are clueless in the war on terror. In his official estimation, giving them all the money they requested would have been a complete waste. Among the units Chertoff rated as in the bottom 15% nationwide, and requiring special federal baby-sitting, was the NYPD’s globally recognized counterterrorism bureau, the very outfit that shamed him in October when Mayor Bloomberg and Commissioner Ray Kelly wisely put the city subways on alert for an attack. Coincidence? We think not, and we dare Chertoff to repeat the same despicable libel face to face with Kelly.
He wouldn’t have the nerve. He has got to go.