US "Rewrites" Geneva Conventions

CAIRO — The Bush administration is redrafting the American war crimes law to guarantee that CIA officers and former military personnel can not be persecuted for humiliating and degrading treatment of detainees.

"This removal of [any] reference to humiliating and degrading treatment will be perceived by experts and probably allies as 'rewriting' " the Geneva Conventions, retired Army Lt. Col. Geoffrey S. Corn, ex-chief of the war law branch of the Army's Office of the Judge Advocate General, told The Washington Post.

The administration has introduced amendments to the War Crimes Act, which Congress passed in 1996 and expanded in 1997, to limit criminal prosecution against CIA officers, political appointees and former military personnel over the maltreatment of detainees.

The changes would narrow criminal prosecution over detainees' maltreatment to only ten specific categories, including torture, murder, rape and hostage-taking.

But they would not include acts considered as "outrages upon the personal dignity" of a prisoner and deliberately humiliating acts under the Geneva Conventions, the universal minimum standard of treatment for civilian detainees in wartime.

Acts such as placing prisoners in "inappropriate conditions of confinement," forcing them to urinate or defecate in their clothes, forced nakedness, use of dog leashes and wearing of women's underwear would be excluded.

Pictures of Iraqi detainees being abused by their US jailers at Abu Ghraib, including some showing bloodied and naked prisoners smeared with excrement or forced to perform sexual acts, broke out in February 2003.

Concerns

The new changes have provoked concern at the International Committee of the Red Cross, the entity responsible for safeguarding the Geneva Conventions.

ICRC lawyers visited the Pentagon and the State Department last week to discuss the issue but left without any expectation that their objections would be heeded, a US official told the daily.

Ten law experts who have seen the new draft agreed that the changes could affect how those involved in detainee matters act and how other nations view Washington's respect for its treaty obligations.

"It's plain that this proposal would abrogate portions of Common Article 3," said Derek P. Jinks, a University of Texas assistant professor of law and author of a forthcoming book on the Geneva Conventions.

He asserted that the "entire family of techniques" that interrogators used to deliberately degrade and humiliate Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib detainees "is not addressed in any way, shape or form" in the new changes.

Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions bars "violence to life and person," including murder, mutilation, cruel treatment and torture.

It also prohibits "outrages upon personal dignity" such as "humiliating and degrading treatment."

The article prohibits sentencing or execution by courts that fail to provide "all the judicial guarantees . . . recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples."

The law experts refuted the Bush administration's argument that the changes were only meant to clarify the "ambiguity" language of Common Article 3.

Retired Rear Adm. John D. Hutson, the Navy's top uniformed lawyer from 1997 to 2000 and now dean of the Franklin Pierce Law Center, said "don't trust the motives of any lawyer who changes a statutory provision that is short, clear, and to the point and replaces it with something that is much longer, more complicated, and includes exceptions within exceptions."

Corn said the article was, according to its written history, "left deliberately vague because efforts to define it would invariably lead to wrongdoers identifying 'exceptions,' and because the meaning was plain -- treat people like humans and not animals or objects."