The Liberal Patriot

Indefensible – Donald Rumsfeld and the Geneva Conventions

J.G. Schwam - May 19, 2000

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld is stepping all over himself trying to hide his lies and deny his black budget Special Access Programs. He’s all over the place. It’s getting so bad that if you ask him Tuesday if it’s Wednesday he’ll probably answer, I’ll have to get back to you on that. It’s been said that if you tell a lie you have to remember what you said for your whole life. If you tell them daily you are in deep trouble. This is our SecDef, too many lies, way too many balls to keep in the air.

Commander in Chief’s George W. Bush’s desk is where the buck stops but he has chosen the cowardly path. He has chosen to let Rumsfeld take a chapter from his father’s playbook and stay out of the loop. This simple mined belief that the use of Reagan’s doctrine of plausible deniability will exculpate him is failing to garner him a pass from anyone. The president like the head coach doesn’t get a pass.

While The Iraq prisoner torture scandal boils over under his chair a memo written by White House Council Alberto Gonzalez within months of the Sept. 11 attacks, surfaces; the memo presents Bush with a specious new legal justification to discard the Geneva Conventions from post 9-11 US military and intelligence operations.

Gonzalez wrote to Bush, "The nature of the new war places a high premium on other factors, such as the ability to quickly obtain information from captured terrorists and their sponsors in order to avoid further atrocities against American civilians...In my judgment, this new paradigm renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions. In my judgment, this new paradigm renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions."

Gonzales said, according to a report in Newsweek magazine, Secretary of State Colin Powell "hit the roof" when he read the memo. Asked about the Gonzales memo, the White House said, "It is the policy of the United States to comply with all of our laws and our treaty obligations."

Congressional critics including Joe Biden said of techniques from the war on al-Qaida. "There is a sort of morphing of the rules of treatment," said Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del. "We can treat al-Qaida this way, and we can't treat prisoners captured this way, but where do insurgents fit? This is a dangerous slope." The often hawkish Biden is possessed of a moral backbone implied by this statement that justifying legally questionable treatment of specific enemies over others is a genie that could not be kept in the bottle if things got ugly elsewhere. Biden’s conscience was right and they did.

On May 8^th an official dispatch on Rumsfeld's remarks at the US Embassy in Ankara, Turkey was filed with Washington during his last visit there filed was by Embassy Washington File Staff Writer Eric Green on official letterhead: “Washington--The United States seeks to comply "fully" with the obligations of the Geneva Conventions with respect to the treatment of prisoners of war and security prisoners in Iraq, says Alberto Gonzales, White House Counsel to President Bush. In a May 8 letter to the Washington Post, Gonzales said the reported abuses against the prisoners being held at the Abu Ghraib prison were "abhorrent and completely unacceptable." Gonzales said that all Americans, and especially members of the U.S. armed forces, share in the "outrage and sadness of knowing that abuses occurred."

This dispatch represents the beginning of the end for Rumsfeld. At this point he has no idea that the crimes of his CACI, Inc. civilian interrogators will ever leak out. He thinks a military chain of command reduced to rubble by trusting generals can be sustained and protected from the destructive reality his contract army, that reports directly to him alone has already wrecked on the integrity of the chain of command US Armed Forces.

Meanwhile, Gonzalez did not expect anyone to pay attention to or even disagree with his letter to the Commander in Chief essentially withdrawing the US as signatories of the Geneva Conventions in the wake of 9-11 and a war they expected to be a cakewalk. He did however know these actions would be necessary at some point to protect the contractors he knew would present a legal issue should their actions be questioned.

On January 25^th 2002, the White House clearly steps away for the Geneva and now classifies the Al-Queda detainees as "unlawful combatants," a designation reeking of obfuscatious spin. They created this designation so they could exempt them from any standards of humanity under the Geneva Conventions. Neither are Taliban detainees determined to be entitled to prisoner of war status.

Green further writes “Gonzales's letter was in response to a May 6^th Washington Post editorial in which he said incorrectly that the Pentagon ruled that the United States would not be bound by the Geneva Conventions. Rather, the White House Counsel said, it is "wrong to imply" that the abuses at Abu Ghraib "occurred in whole or in part because the United States has ruled itself as not bound by the Geneva Convention, because no such ruling has been made."

The Gonzales memo is unambiguous but Gonzales said on the May 8^th visit to the US Embassy in Turkey "there should be no doubt in anyone's mind that the United States fully recognizes its obligations under the Geneva Conventions." He added that the U.S. Department of Defense is conducting a full investigation of the reported abuses and "will hold accountable anyone found responsible."

Gonzalez on one hand advocates that the US can determine when the Conventions are justified and when they are not. While on the other says the military will uphold the articles of the Convention regarding the treatment of prisoners. Only Rumsfeld is stepping his tongue often more than Gonzales.

When the ruling voiding POW protections was issued Gonzales said the president ordered that U.S. armed forces treat detainees "humanely and, to the extent appropriate and consistent with military necessity, in a manner consistent with the principles of the Third Geneva Convention."

It is difficult to determine if Green is simply reporting Gonzalez’s and Rumsfeld’s conflicting statements or quietly excoriating them. Even if not, the letter is strangely contradictory.

On a prior occasion when five captured US soldiers were paraded in front of the Iraqi television cameras on Sunday March 21 Donald Rumsfeld complained that "it is against the Geneva convention to show photographs of prisoners of war in a manner that is humiliating for them". His statements on the enforcement the Conventions switch back and forth, depending on the citizenship of the victims. In Return to the Planet of the Apes, a human was sentenced to death for humiliating an ape that once led him around on a leash. In Rumsfeld’s world we are the apes and the enemy of the day, are the humans.

On March. 23, 2003 after insurgents Iraqi captured American soldiers and journalists a Pentagon transcript details an interview on CBS' Face the Nation’s. Bob Sheiffer addresses Rumsfeld; “Mr. Secretary, I am told that we have just gotten some pictures that have come in from al Jazeera. I'm told that these are Americans in Iraq. I don't know what else to say about it. Let's just watch -- it appears that these are Americans who may be in Iraqi hands”

Later in the same transcript Rumsfeld says, “I will say this, the Geneva Convention indicates that it's not permitted to photograph and embarrass or humiliate prisoners of war, and if they do happen to be American or coalition ground forces that have been captured, the Geneva Convention indicates how they should be treated”. Rumsfeld can't seem to remember the golden rule.

It is increasingly likely that proof will emerge that Rumsfeld clearly believed that by using private citizens as torturers instead of military personnel he could deny any obligation to uphold the Geneva Conventions. The reality is that the line is not that blurry or as Seymour Hersh implies in his May 15^th New Yorker Magazine article a “gray zone”. Rumsfeld cannot deny one thing, US taxpayer dollars were used to pay these contractors. How he thinks this will absolve the US government of culpability is intellectually sophomoric and beyond reason.

Yet as late as May 12^th, much after the Taguba Report was filed the Army Times reports that Rumsfeld defended military interrogation techniques in Iraq on Wednesday, rejecting complaints that they violate international rules and may endanger Americans taken prisoner”.

Rumsfeld apparently also told a Senate committee that Pentagon lawyers had approved methods such as sleep deprivation and dietary changes as well as rules permitting prisoners to be made to assume stress positions. Article 3 of the Geneva conventions is strikingly clear and simple on interrogation techniques and treatment standards.

Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, stated in the same article that the rules require prisoners to be treated humanely at all times.

Rumsfeld’s plan to prosecute enlisted personnel for torture and expect the public will loose interest and forget about the officers and their civilian Pentagon commanders, he and Cambone, will not succeed. Too many Americans are politically engaged. Too many hang on his every lie, spin and twist.

Rumsfeld is backtracking and sputtering daily to justify his precarious position. The deeds being done, neither his resignation nor his mendacious attempts to justify a morally and legally indefensible position will give Bush and himself the deniability they seek for him. War crimes and violations of the Geneva Conventions are simply that. Rumsfeld is trying to distance himself from his own words. The more they talk the thicker the lies get. This time it’s public record. It’s indefensible.

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