Prisoners of war Human

Prisoners of war
Human-rights principles are not governed by semantic technicalities

Jan. 22, 2002

The United States’ treatment of prisoners taken in Afghanistan has caused a stir elsewhere, with the British government expressing concern about photos showing handcuffed, kneeling detainees wearing black-out goggles, earmuffs and face masks.

That the U.S. Department of Defense asked American media outlets not to publish such photos suggests that U.S. officials knew they would provoke questions about treatment of those captured in Afghanistan. On Monday, British Prime Minister Tony Blair said he was satisfied by assurances that the detainees were indeed being treated humanely. Those assurances, however, are not likely to convince all critics. Even Blair has insisted that the prisoners be afforded the rights guaranteed to prisoners of war under the Geneva Conventions, alhough the United States has been adamant about classifying them as "unlawful combatants" rather than POWs.

While those pictures won’t play well in the Middle East, there are ways to mitigate the public-relations problem. Washington insists that the detainees are receiving humane treatment, and that can be demonstrated by allowing observers, perhaps representatives from such an organization as the International Red Cross, into Guantanamo.

There’s more to this issue than window-dressing, though. In fact, there are several important components. One is strategy for the War on Terrorism, a problem made even more insidious by the willingness of too many people in the world to view the United States as the root of all evil. We can’t kill all of them, so it behooves us to convince as many as possible that our way is better, and evidence that our way is more humane is a good place to start. Anyone who believes he’s going to be taken far from his home and tortured to death is likely to believe his least painful option is to die fighting and take as many Americans with him as possible. There’s little incentive to cooperate, even covertly.

Beyond that is the larger issue of principle, of the Golden Rule. The United States believes that its military and all its citizens deserve humane treatment, anywhere in the world. That works partly because we have the force to back up the demand, but it works better when viewed as a moral principle. The way we handle our prisoners makes a strong statement about our belief in international human rights.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on Sunday said the detainees, accused of being Taliban and al-Quaida members, would be tried by military commissions on Guantanamo. Because the base is not on U.S. soil, they would be denied the right of appeal in U.S. courts. That’s possible because of their status as "unlawful combatants" rather than soldiers, a status they, themselves, could not have changed. If the United States had declared war on Afghanistan, they’d now be prisoners of war, but because of the tribal structure of that region and our goal of avoiding destabilization, Afghanistan wasn’t the entity we were fighting. Regimented and committed as they were, they were not official combatants in a war that is also not official for all its bloody reality.

So now they are not official prisoners of war, a designation that need make no difference in their eventual fate but that would allow Americans one more justification in claiming moral superiority in this war. We should let the world see that we are treating them according to our own laws, which we say are the fairest in the world. We can hold those detainees up as examples of what happens to people who attack the United States, but we should not turn them into poster-soldiers for Islamic fundamentalist recruitment.