Via Junkyard Blog this Wall Street Journal explanation as to what POW status and the Geneva Convention really mean. As opposed to the cherished misbelief in the media and elsewhere, any protective status that prisoners and combatants have in war, capture or interrogation is established by their actions and conduct. Break the rules, and the best you can hope for is that your captors will be inclined towards giving you the benefit of the doubt.
But there is no good excuse for the recent accusations against US forces by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), which should be perfectly aware of how these things work.
The basic idea behind granting POW status is that soldiers who surrender or are captured are not to be punished so long as they have behaved according to certain rules — such as fighting in uniform and doing their best to direct their own attacks at enemy soldiers rather than civilians. Part of their protection from punishment is that they not be subject to coercive interrogation; they are required only to give name, rank and serial number. They may, however, be held for the duration of the conflict so that they do not return to the
battlefield.
The POW concept is certainly a great humanitarian advance, since the slaughter of captured enemies used to be routine and since it provides some incentive to fair battlefield conduct. But it is a concept in jeopardy thanks to its ostensible guardians at the ICRC. By demanding POW status for un-uniformed combatants who target civilians — in contravention of the plain language of the Geneva Conventions — the ICRC started the fight over Guantanamo by attempting to remove one of the few carrots we have to encourage humane behavior in war.
Now it goes further and demands that these combatants get even more privileges than legitimate POWs. Has it occurred to no one in Geneva that indefinite detention can’t possibly be “tantamount to torture” for illegal combatants if it is the expected course of events for real POWs? The prospect of Guantanamo detainees returning to the battlefield is real, and more than two dozen of those already released have done so.
The ICRC also objects to interrogation pressure that is typically no more abusive than the good cop-bad cop routines common in American police stations. And where the interrogation techniques go further, they include nothing worse than loud music, temperature extremes, and uncomfortable positions. To call such discomforts “a form of torture” is to rob the word of all meaning and implicitly elevate the behavior of truly odious regimes.
Finally, from the damned-if-you-do file, we have the ICRC complaining that U.S. doctors took the care to examine the detainees’ health to determine if particular stress techniques might be too much for a given individual. This is alleged somehow to be a violation of “medical ethics” rather than the example of American humanity that it actually is.
If the ICRC accusations sound more like political maneuvering than legitimate concern, there’s a reason. Junkyard’s B. Preston adds;
One source of tension between the US and the ICRC concerns Protocol 1, a 1970s attempt to revise the Geneva Conventions. The US (along with several of our strongest allies) has explicitly rejected Protocol 1 because it includes non-state actors (i.e. terrorists) under Geneva’s protections. That would effectively grant protections to terrorists that they will never grant any of their hostages and would also keep us from gaining any useful intelligence from detained combatants. That intelligence saves lives and weakens the terrorists. It shortens the war, in our favor.
At least part of the intention of the ICRC’s Gitmo report appears to be an attempt to force the US to ratify Protocol 1 by default, by pressuring us into granting the terrorists at Gitmo Protocol 1 status.
The Red Cross’s one true strength has been a long-established and respected reputation for neutrality during world conflicts. If the politically motivated left continues to infect the ICRC and squander trust to score a few political hits for the global cause of anti-Americanism, this once hallowed organization risks not only the lives of their workers on the ground, but their very reason for being.
I also suspect that some of the behavior of the ICRC may be fueled by instincts of self- preservation. The modern reality for the Red Cross is that terrorist groups tend not to care about noble concepts like neutrality unless there is some advantage to be realized. I feel for them, but that’s not an excuse for abandoning their most fundamental strength. If the Red Cross believes it can buy some insurance by advocating for terrorists as though they should be considered “equals” to legitimate military prisoners, they can expect to be disappointed. If they cannot depend on their historic neutrality to protect their people on the ground, conspiring to aid one side over the other is not likely to improve matters.
