:ahaa: I figured it out! How we are different! Y’see.. we herd the Iraqi prisoners like cattle and the pictures we allow are always of dozens at a time so we can’t be singling any one out for the purpose of humiliation.. oh well, it sounded reasonable in my head for a moment…
Nadia: Thanks for fixing that pic earlier. :k:
Spoon, my pleasure. 
Talk about the timing. :smack: Slightly too convenient for Rummy. Now they can trumpet this as - ‘see how humanely we treat these prisoners at Guantanamo, we’ve even let them free’.
Afghans freed from Guantanamo camp, BBC, 24 March 2003
Heh.. from that article: US investigators have decided the men are not terrorists, an official working for Afghan President Hamid Karzai said. Took a year plus to decide that?? That’s humane??
Wait a sec… they let 19 go home but..
In the US, a Pentagon spokesman said on Sunday that 30 more detainees had been flown to Guantanamo, taking the total number of detainees there to 660.
Nadia.. unfortunately this probably will fly with the likes of Fox News viewers, the only constituency that seems to matter to Bush.
[QUOTE]
Originally posted by spoon: *
**Wait a sec... they let 19 go home but.. *In the US, a Pentagon spokesman said on Sunday that 30 more detainees had been flown to Guantanamo, taking the total number of detainees there to 660.
[/QUOTE]
**
660?! ... being detained in small cells with no access to lawyers... minimal or no access to families and loved ones... several of them not even charged yet with any crime so they do not even know precisely for what charges they are being held... They are not even designated as POWs, because remember the US govt. considers them not worthy of the POW designation. Thirty more were flown in on Sunday. They may be tried in the future by secret military tribunals - presided over by none other than Rummy himself.
Don't they realize how hypocritical they sound.
>>...this probably will fly with the likes of Fox News viewers, **the only constituency that seems to matter to Bush.<<
lol. True. Expect Fox to make much of this generous gesture from the US govt.
[QUOTE]
Originally posted by Nadia_H: *
*
......several of them not even charged yet with any crime so they do not even know precisely for what charges they are being held... They are not even designated as POWs, because remember the US govt. considers them not worthy of the POW designation. .....
[/QUOTE]
Fighting against US is a crime by itself, and that too without US approval (perhaps that is reason for the word "illegal").
They were not POWs, they were EOB (escapee of bombing). There was no war in Afghanistan.
whatever the case, Iraqis should treat these POW humanely
POW TV
Why Rumsfeld should be careful about lecturing Saddam about the Geneva Conventions.
By Jack Shafer, Posted Monday, March 24, 2003, at 4:35 PM PT
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld asserted his mastery of the Geneva Conventions yesterday on Face the Nation when he protested the treatment of U.S. soldiers taken prisoner by Iraqi forces. The five prisoners, all frightened and some wounded, were videotaped by an Iraqi TV journalist who asked if their invasion had been greeted by guns or roses. The images were broadcast around the world.
“The Geneva Convention indicates that it’s not permitted to photograph and embarrass or humiliate prisoners of war,” Rumsfeld said.
Human Rights Watch agreed with Rumsfeld, chiding Iraq for its treatment of the POWs. But in the same press release, HRW criticized the United States for parading Iraqi prisoners around for the benefit of the news cameras, urging it to stop.
Who’s violating the Geneva Conventions? And how culpable are the Iraqi media and the media embedded with the coalition forces?
Both Rumsfeld and Human Rights Watch base their charges on Article 13 of the Third Geneva Convention. Article 13 says nothing specific about videotaping of prisoners—intrusive or otherwise—because the convention was approved in 1949, long before the advent of portable video cameras, satellite uplinks, and news around the clock. Article 13 concerns itself primarily with merciful treatment of prisoners. The relevant section reads:
Prisoners of war must at all times be humanely treated. … [P]risoners of war must at all times be protected, particularly against acts of violence or intimidation and against insults and public curiosity. [Emphasis added.]
The “insults and public curiosity” language sounds archaic, but it wasn’t that long ago prisoners of war were routinely dragged through the streets of their captors in shackles, ridiculed and often beaten—a fate far worse than being videotaped in a compromising position after surrender. Professor Michael Byers, who teaches international law at Duke University, says he can recall no war crimes prosecution under the Geneva Conventions for filming prisoners. But, he adds, there have been very few war crimes trials under the Geneva Conventions in the age of television.
The Geneva Conventions must be understood as a human rights treaty, say Byers, created to protect individuals and not the state that signed it. When a soldier surrenders, the army that takes him prisoner must observe all the Geneva Conventions’ rules and strictures. The Iraqi TV “interview” of the American prisoners appears to have been designed specifically to humiliate and demean—which makes it seem a clear violation of Article 13.
But what of news footage of Iraqi prisoners taken by journalists on either side? Because journalists aren’t bound by the Geneva Conventions, they can’t be prosecuted for interviewing or taping prisoners. It falls upon the military to uphold the conventions by preventing the press from exploiting the vulnerable prisoners. But, Byers adds, the conventions shouldn’t be used to prohibit reasonable reporting as long as the footage isn’t designed to intimidate or humiliate. Some of the footage shot of Iraqi prisoners by embedded journalists, especially the closeups of weeping, surrendering troops, approaches this line, and, depending on your interpretation, crosses it.
Byers says he thinks Iraqi military will treat captured American “pretty well” for two reasons: 1) If Iraq loses this war, as many Iraqis think it will, the military knows war crime trials will follow; and 2) because the legality of the U.S.-British intervention is questioned around the world, the Iraqis will want to appear as being in compliance with the Geneva Conventions if they mount a legal case against the coalition.
Rumsfeld is a bit two-faced on the Geneva Conventions. One year ago, Byers criticized Rumsfeld in the pages of the Guardian for the U.S. treatment of the hundreds of Afghan prisoners currently held in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The Guantanamo prisoners have had their beards forcibly shaven off, a violation of their human dignity under the 1966 international covenant on civil and political rights. And, they have been photographed by the press in shackles and with hoods over their heads. Subsequently, the United States limited media access to prisoners citing the “insults and public curiosity” passage from the Geneva Conventions. But at the same time, Rumsfeld maintains the prisoners don’t have any rights under the Geneva Conventions because they are “unlawful combatants.”
Byers notes that the “unlawful combatants” category is one of Rumsfeld’s invention and not found in any international treaty. Under Article 5 of the Third Geneva Convention, military tribunals—not Donald Rumsfeld—should determine which prisoners should be prosecuted as criminal suspects and which should be accorded prisoner of war status. “The record shows that those who negotiated the convention were intent on making it impossible for the determination to be made by any single person,” Byers writes.
To be sure, the Iraqis aren’t taking their human rights cues from Guantanamo. But if they want a precedent, there it is.
That’s one of the points that George Monbiot, in the following piece, discusses. Some will find it a very off-balanced piece; i don’t subscribe to that view. Read it for yourself and make your own decision. Note his last line in particular.
One rule for them, George Monbiot
The Guardian, 25 March 2003
~ ~ ~
From another piece: “Al-Sahhaf, the Iraqi information minister, said the POWs would be treated according to the Geneva Conventions.”
POW rights denied ‘on both sides’, The Guardian, 25 March 2003
http://www.swissinfo.org/sen/swissinfo.html?siteSect=105&sid=1716883
ICRC says both sides are violating the Geneva convention.
What Geneva Convention?
From Al Jazeera about the facts of 1991 gulf war…
In the 1991 Gulf War, US-led allies repeatedly struck water storage and treatment and facilities. Since then, thousands of Iraqis have died from outbreaks of water-borne diseases such as typhoid, dysentery, hepatitis, cholera and polio that reached epidemic levels.
"Water facilities were destroyed in 1991 to put pressure on Saddam Hussein to leave Kuwait,” said a retired US army colonel who preferred not to be named. …
However George Washington University professor, Thomas Nagay has obtained and published US Defence Department documents that revealed water facilities were in fact, deliberate targets in 1991. …
The document lists the “most likely diseases during next sixty-ninety days: diarrheal diseases (particularly children); acute respiratory illnesses (colds and influenza); typhoid; hepatitis A (particularly children); measles, diphtheria, and pertussis (particularly children); meningitis, including meningococcal (particularly children); cholera (possible, but less likely).”
Critics of the US military tactics during the 1991 Gulf War are quick to cite Article 54 of the Geneva Convention. It states:
“It is prohibited to attack, destroy, remove, or render useless objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population, such as foodstuffs, crops, livestock, drinking water installations and supplies, and irrigation works, for the purpose of denying them for their sustenance value to the civilian population or to the adverse party, whatever the motive, whether in order to starve out civilians, to cause them to move away, or for any other motive.” …
**The Pentagon claims food and medicine supplies are on the way to the Basra area, and will be delivered as soon as the area is “secure.”
But, Dennis Haliday, formerly the head of the Oil for Food program, criticised the US for not immediately providing water to Basra residents.
Ironically, he noted, the US has been able to provide water for fighting oil fires. **
inkalaaaaaab zindabaddddddddddddd zionism and imperialism murdabaddddddddddddddddddddd
ab sarey convention yaad ae gaey… (edited by Baba G)
Bush and Rumsfeld Had Better Watch Their Back
George Monbiot, The Guardian
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.
Please comment on the following:
1) POW protections are only provided to UNIFORMED troops. Those lacking uniforms are considered to be "enemy combatants" , and are not subject to the protections of the conventions. This is because the lack of uniforms is a grevious violation of the first priority of the Geneva convention which is to protect innocents by being able to distinguish combatants from non-combatants. Please tell me what uniform is used to distinguish Al-qaeda....
2)Even prisoners accorded full POW status are not repatriated until the conflict ends. Please tell me when the conflict with the Al-Qaeda ended....
3)POW status extends only to combatants sponsored by a government, or local militias defending their lands. Al-Qaeda were foreigners recruited and paid by a non government entitity. (OBL) Technically they meet the requirements of mercenaries which are accorded no protections under the Geneva conventions.
4)POWs (and illegal enemy combatants) do not have to be charged with crimes to be held till the end of the conflict, thus they do not have to be afforded access to lawyers.
And on to Iraq....
Most Americans are not bothered by showing POWs, giving their names and towns. Minor infractions. The sight of US bodies with bullet holes square in the middle of their foreheads does tend to get us riled up. Please expound on the Geneva convention and summary executions.....
A hungry, starving nation should buy UNIFORMS for its soldiers against an invading army so that they will be considered “POW” if they are caught by the invading army.
In fact, its a disgusting situation 
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by Ohioguy: *
......
3)POW status extends only to combatants sponsored by a government, or local militias defending their lands. Al-Qaeda were foreigners recruited and paid by a non government entitity. (OBL) Technically they meet the requirements of mercenaries which are accorded no protections under the Geneva conventions.
.....
[/QUOTE]
By this, you are denying Muslims to help other Muslims. Today I say blast all the Geneva conventions, no regard at all. If US can disregard UN whenever desired, we should do the same.
"A hungry, starving nation should buy UNIFORMS for its soldiers against an invading army so that they will be considered "POW" if they are caught by the invading army."
Please tell me that OBL could not afford uniforms. THEN there are complaints about deaths of innocents! The rules of the Geneva convention are not manditory. But don't expect the protections if the rules are not followed.
"By this, you are denying Muslims to help other Muslims. Today I say blast all the Geneva conventions, no regard at all. If US can disregard UN whenever desired, we should do the same."
The Al-Qaeda could have become citizens of Afghanistan to avoid this. Perhaps the Ummah will have an ambassador as the Vatican does. Then it can have mutual defense treaties with any country.
Until then, don't hide behind the Geneva convention, and pick the half you like and discard the rest.
[QUOTE]
Originally posted by Ohioguy:
Until then, don't hide behind the Geneva convention, and pick the half you like and discard the rest.
[/QUOTE]
Yes, I think the Red Cross has in effect said that to both sides in this conflict. :)
The red cross was specifically referring to photographs. There is a substantial difference between "state controlled" media, and the 500 or so independent media protected by the US military.
So far no western media have not displayed Iraqi POW's assasinated with bullet holes in their foreheads.
[QUOTE]
Originally posted by Ohioguy:
The red cross was specifically referring to photographs.
[/QUOTE]
Yes, I know the Red Cross stated that both sides have violated the Geneva convention. Thank you. :)
P.S. Do you remember whose media printed pictures of the charred bodies of Iraqi soldiers in the first Gulf war?
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by Ohioguy: *
The red cross was specifically referring to photographs. There is a substantial difference between "state controlled" media, and the 500 or so independent media protected by the US military.
So far no western media have not displayed Iraqi POW's assasinated with bullet holes in their foreheads.
[/QUOTE]
Ok now, it has to be "assisanted with bullet holes in their foreheads" to be not shown, others are okay?