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Bush and Rumsfeld Had Better Watch Their Back
George
Monbiot, The Guardian Published on Thursday, March 27, 2003
LONDON, 27 March 2003 Suddenly, the government of the United
States has discovered the virtues of international law. It may be waging an illegal war against a sovereign state; it may
be seeking to destroy every treaty which impedes its attempts to run the world, but when five of its captured soldiers were
paraded in front of the Iraqi television cameras on Sunday, Donald Rumsfeld, the US defense secretary, immediately complained
that "it is against the Geneva Convention to show photographs of prisoners of war in a manner that is humiliating for them".
He
is, of course, quite right. Article 13 of the third convention, concerning the treatment of prisoners, insists that they "must
at all times be protected ... against insults and public curiosity". This may number among the less heinous of the possible
infringements of the laws of war, but the conventions, ratified by Iraq in 1956, are non-negotiable. If you break them, you
should expect to be prosecuted for war crimes.
This being so, Rumsfeld had better
watch his back. For this enthusiastic convert to the cause of legal warfare is, as head of the Defense Department, responsible
for a series of crimes sufficient, were he ever to be tried, to put him away for the rest of his natural life.
His
prison camp in Guantanamo Bay, in Cuba, where 641 men (nine of whom are British citizens) are held, breaches no fewer than
15 articles of the third convention. The US government broke the first of these (Article 13) as soon as the prisoners arrived,
by displaying them, just as the Iraqis have done, on television. In this case, however, they were not encouraged to address
the cameras. They were kneeling on the ground, hands tied behind their backs, wearing blacked-out goggles and earphones. In
breach of Article 18, they had been stripped of their own clothes and deprived of their possessions. They were then interned
in a penitentiary (against Article 22), where they were denied proper mess facilities (26), canteens (28), religious premises
(34), opportunities for physical exercise (38), access to the text of the convention (41), freedom to write to their families
(70 and 71) and parcels of food and books (72).
They were not "released and repatriated without delay after the cessation
of active hostilities" (118), because, the US authorities say, their interrogation might, one day, reveal interesting information
about Al-Qaeda. Article 17 rules that captives are obliged to give only their name, rank, number and date of birth. No "coercion
may be inflicted on prisoners of war to secure from them information of any kind whatever". In the hope of breaking them,
however, the authorities have confined them to solitary cells and subjected them to what is now known as "torture lite": Sleep
deprivation and constant exposure to bright light. Unsurprisingly, several of the prisoners have sought to kill themselves,
by smashing their heads against the walls or trying to slash their wrists with plastic cutlery.
The US government claims
that these men are not subject to the Geneva conventions, as they are not "prisoners of war", but "unlawful combatants". The
same claim could be made, with rather more justice, by the Iraqis holding the US soldiers who illegally invaded their country.
But this redefinition is itself a breach of Article 4 of the third convention, under which people detained
as suspected members of a militia (the Taleban) or a volunteer corps (Al-Qaeda) must be regarded as prisoners of war.
Even
if there is doubt about how such people should be classified, Article 5 insists that they "shall enjoy the protection of the
present convention until such time as their status has been determined by a competent tribunal".
But when, earlier
this month, lawyers representing 16 of them demanded a court hearing, the US court of appeals ruled that as Guantanamo Bay
is not sovereign US territory, the men have no constitutional rights. Many of these prisoners appear
to have been working in Afghanistan as teachers, engineers or aid workers. If the US government either tried
or released them, its embarrassing lack of evidence would be brought to light.
You would hesitate to describe
these prisoners as lucky, unless you knew what had happened to some of the other men captured by the Americans and their allies
in Afghanistan. On Nov. 21, 2001, around 8,000 Taleban soldiers and Pashtun civilians surrendered at Konduz to the Northern
Alliance commander, Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum. Many of them have never been seen again.
As
Jamie Doran's film Afghan Massacre: Convoy of Death records, some hundreds, possibly thousands, of them were loaded into container
lorries at Qala-i-Zeini, near the town of Mazar-i-Sharif, on Nov. 26 and 27. The doors were sealed and the lorries were left
to stand in the sun for several days. At length, they departed for Sheberghan prison, 80 miles away. The prisoners, many of
whom were dying of thirst and asphyxiation, started banging on the sides of the trucks. Dostum's men stopped the convoy and
machine-gunned the containers. When they arrived at Sheberghan, most of the captives were dead.
The
US special forces running the prison watched the bodies being unloaded. They instructed Dostum's men to "get rid of them before
satellite pictures can be taken". Doran interviewed a Northern Alliance soldier guarding the prison.
"I was a witness when an American soldier broke one prisoner's neck. The Americans did whatever they wanted. We had no power
to stop them." Another soldier alleged: "They took the prisoners outside and beat them up, and then returned
them to the prison. But sometimes they were never returned, and they disappeared."
Many of the survivors were loaded back in the containers with the corpses, then driven to a place in the desert
called Dasht-i-Leili. In the presence of up to 40 US special forces, the living and the dead were dumped into ditches.
Anyone
who moved was shot. The German newspaper Die Zeit investigated the claims and concluded that: "No one doubted that the Americans
had taken part. Even at higher levels there are no doubts on this issue." The US group Physicians for Human
Rights visited the places identified by Doran's witnesses and found they "all ... contained human remains consistent with
their designation as possible grave sites".
It should not be necessary to point out that hospitality of this kind also
contravenes the third Geneva Convention, which prohibits "violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds,
mutilation, cruel treatment and torture", as well as extra-judicial execution. Donald Rumsfeld's department,
assisted by a pliant media, has done all it can to suppress Jamie Doran's film, while Gen. Dostum has begun to assassinate
his witnesses.
It is not hard, therefore, to see why the US government fought first to prevent the
establishment of the international criminal court, and then to ensure that its own citizens are not subject to its jurisdiction.
The five soldiers dragged in front of the cameras on Monday should thank their lucky stars that they are prisoners not of
the American forces fighting for civilization, but of the "barbaric and inhuman" Iraqis.
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