4.16.2005
Detainees? What Detainees? (IPSNews.net)
By William Fisher
NEW YORK, Apr 13 (IPS) - The U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, the military's most senior leaders, want Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to approve new guidelines that will formalise the George W. Bush administration's policy of imprisoning so-called enemy combatants without the protections of the Geneva Conventions and enable the Pentagon to legally hold ”ghost detainees”, a human rights group is charging.
In a letter to Rumsfeld, advocacy group Human Rights Watch (HRW) said, ”Denying the protections of the Geneva Conventions to persons apprehended in the global war on terror is unsupported as a matter of law, represents a radical deviation from the standards that have traditionally guided U.S. military operations, and places U.S. service members and civilians detained by enemy forces at greater risk of mistreatment.”
The new memorandum, now in final draft, is known as the ”Joint Doctrine for Detainee Operations: Joint Publication 3-63”, and is dated Mar. 23, 2005.
”If the draft memorandum is approved, it will formalise 'enemy combatant' as a class of prisoner that the Bush administration says has no protections under the Geneva Conventions,” HRW attorney John Sifton told IPS. ”There are no categories of prisoners unprotected by one or another of the Geneva Convention.”
An additional concern, he said, is that the draft memorandum would give the military authority to classify as an enemy combatant anyone whose name appears on a government watchlist.
”The proposed watchlist includes a wide variety of groups from Sikhs to followers of Peru's Shining Path, and potentially hundreds of thousands of people named Ahmed or Mohamed. This is a huge and radical departure that could further erode the rule of law.”
(More ... RIGHTS-US: Detainees? What Detainees?) ¶ 14:47
NEW YORK, Apr 13 (IPS) - The U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, the military's most senior leaders, want Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to approve new guidelines that will formalise the George W. Bush administration's policy of imprisoning so-called enemy combatants without the protections of the Geneva Conventions and enable the Pentagon to legally hold ”ghost detainees”, a human rights group is charging.
In a letter to Rumsfeld, advocacy group Human Rights Watch (HRW) said, ”Denying the protections of the Geneva Conventions to persons apprehended in the global war on terror is unsupported as a matter of law, represents a radical deviation from the standards that have traditionally guided U.S. military operations, and places U.S. service members and civilians detained by enemy forces at greater risk of mistreatment.”
The new memorandum, now in final draft, is known as the ”Joint Doctrine for Detainee Operations: Joint Publication 3-63”, and is dated Mar. 23, 2005.
”If the draft memorandum is approved, it will formalise 'enemy combatant' as a class of prisoner that the Bush administration says has no protections under the Geneva Conventions,” HRW attorney John Sifton told IPS. ”There are no categories of prisoners unprotected by one or another of the Geneva Convention.”
An additional concern, he said, is that the draft memorandum would give the military authority to classify as an enemy combatant anyone whose name appears on a government watchlist.
”The proposed watchlist includes a wide variety of groups from Sikhs to followers of Peru's Shining Path, and potentially hundreds of thousands of people named Ahmed or Mohamed. This is a huge and radical departure that could further erode the rule of law.”
(More ... RIGHTS-US: Detainees? What Detainees?) ¶ 14:47
