Washington – The Pentagon has decided to omit from new detainee policies a key tenet of the Geneva Conventions 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 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 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 prison or the killings of civilians last year at Hadithah, 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. And it undercuts arguments that U.S. forces follow the toughest, most broadly accepted standards when fighting wars.
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 Conventions. But in 2002, Bush suspended portions of the Geneva Conventions for captured al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters. Bush’s order superseded military policy in effect at the time.
