HOW HE SEES IT Geneva Conventions protect thugs at Guantanamo

By IRVING C. SHELDON Jr.
PROVIDENCE JOURNAL
A panel discussion I recently attended at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy in New London, Conn., took up the subject of the detainees at Guantanamo Bay. There were two law professors -- from Harvard and Berkeley -- a Heritage Foundation think tanker and a former Reagan Justice Department official.
The United States has taken a beating in public opinion because of its treatment of prisoners in Afghanistan and Iraq, and at Guantanamo.
But, as the discussion progressed, it became clear how much depends on the Geneva Conventions, and their distinction between lawful and unlawful combatants. And there is a distinction between the prisoners at Guantanamo and at least most of those at Iraq's Abu Ghraib.
The latter were mostly uniformed members of the Iraqi armed forces, and fully entitled to the conventions' protections.
The purpose of their detention, according to the conventions, was not to punish them, but to prevent them from taking up arms again against the allied forces.
The mistreatment of a very few soldiers by American troops was a serious blot on our escutcheon.
War wasn't ever thus. Before the first Geneva Convention was drafted in 1864, it was still common to simply shoot captives -- and that didn't immediately cease in 1864. But even when internment facilities for prisoners of war existed, such as in the U.S. Civil War, conditions were execrable. Andersonville, a Confederate camp for Union troops in Georgia, became a huge scandal after the war. In all, some 56,000 Americans died in Northern and Southern prison camps during the war.
Geneva's humanitarian aims
The Geneva Conventions now specify that POWs be provided books, writing materials, recreational facilities and other comforts, as well as access by the Red Cross. The "spirit of Geneva," if it were to be taken to its idealized level, would probably stipulate that prisoners of war be sent to university (not to be confused with the "jihad university" that American military commanders charge Abu Ghraib, now under Iraqi government control, has become).
Wartime exigencies have not been such that, as far as anyone knows, this has ever happened, but as one panelist noted, if the Swiss were to go to war against, say, the Liechtensteiners, it might. Somewhere between this and Guantanamo is Colonel Klink's regime in "Hogan's Heroes."
The real purpose of Geneva in affording protections to soldiers is to protect civilians from the kind of fighters that are incarcerated at Guantanamo: who don't wear uniforms; who include, or deploy, suicide bombers; and whose tactics let them mingle in crowds of civilians and use them as human shields.
Pro and con
David Kennedy, of Harvard, suggested that fighters for Al-Qaida and other terrorist organizations resort to such tactics because they have no choice. They can't stand up to America's overwhelming military might on the battlefield. But Todd Gaziano, of the Heritage Foundation, spoke of the cowardice of this approach. We don't usually think that people willing to die are cowards, but it is a very traditional conception of suicide as a kind of moral cowardice. And their willingness to take bystanders makes them murderers, as well.
That pretty well cinched the argument. The prisoners at Guantanamo are cowards, according to our perception of honor. Their military strategy amounts to shooting us in the back. Their treatment at our hands has been far more humane than they deserve.
One of the young Coastie cadets in the audience asked about the efforts of non-governmental agencies to amend the Geneva Conventions to include such fighters, but it was clear by then what a huge mistake that would be, for the horror it would unleash on civilian populations everywhere, and for basic concepts of honor and justice, as they have come to be clarified and defined over many years.
Do the conventions mean that there are no restraints on what we can do with the prisoners at Guantanamo? Nobody said so, but the legal dilemma of these thugs -- and the others, when we capture them -- who have hijacked a religion and hold its adherents, and many others, in terror, really comes down to the quality of our mercy.
X Irving C. Sheldon Jr. is a member of The Providence Journal's editorial board. Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service.