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Rumsfeld
Reaffirms Guantanamo Detainees Not PoWs
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| Rumsfeld:
"Detainees do not qualify as POW" |
GUANTANAMO
BAY, Cuba, Jan. 28 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - U.S. Defense Secretary
Donald Rumsfeld said Sunday that the captives from the war in Afghanistan were
"terrorists" who did not deserve to be considered prisoners of war.
Rumsfeld
was speaking at the U.S. Naval Station at Guantanamo in an inspection tour of
the base and its detention camp for Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters.
"They
are not PoWs. They will not be determined to be PoWs," Rumsfeld told
reporters accompanying him at the end of a visit to inspect detention conditions
for the 158 prisoners of 25 different nationalities held at a maximum security
facility here.
"They
were unlawful combatants ... We have a group of people who are Al-Qaeda and
Taliban terrorists," he claimed.
The
distinction between a PoW and “unlawful combatant” is significant because
under the Geneva Convention, written after World War II, a PoW has certain legal
rights that would govern the U.S. military's interrogations of the detainees and
would require that they be released when hostilities in Afghanistan are over.
If
there is any ambiguity about whether a captive should be considered a prisoner
of war, the Geneva Convention says a special three-person military tribunal
should be convened to decide.
Rumsfeld’s
comments coincided with a debate within the U.S. administration whether the
detainees should be treated within the parameters of the Geneva Conventions,
amid mounting international criticism over the detainees' treatment.
Vice
President, Dick Cheney, agreed with Rumsfeld saying the U.S. had nothing to
apologize for, and that the detainees were probably being treated “better than
they deserve,” the BBC reported.
"We're
all in agreement – Colin [Powell], me, Donald Rumsfeld that these [prisoners]
are not lawful combatants, they are not prisoners of war," Cheney told Fox
News Sunday.
"There's
a legal issue involved as to whether they should be treated within the confines
of the Geneva Convention, which does have a section that deals with unlawful
combatants or whether they should be treated outside the Geneva
Convention," Cheney added.
He
said State Department lawyers were debating the issue with those of the Justice
Department and the White House, and Bush would make a decision.
"These
are the worst of a very bad lot," he claimed. "They are very
dangerous. They are devoted to killing millions of Americans, innocent
Americans, if they can, and they are perfectly prepared to die in the effort.
And they need to be detained, treated very cautiously, so that our people are
not at risk."
"There
is a definition of what a lawful combatant is. There are four or five criteria
... And there is a good understanding of what an unlawful combatant is,"
Rumsfeld said here.
The
Al-Qaeda captives were "obviously part of a terrorist network instead of an
army," Rumsfeld claimed. "They did not wear uniforms, with their
weapons in public display, with insignias and behaving [as] an army is behaving.
They went around like terrorists," because their methods violate
internationally accepted laws and specifically targets civilians. He claimed
that detained fighters of Afghanistan's ousted Taliban regime had worked in
tandem with Al-Qaeda.
Rumsfeld,
one of the most outspoken defenders of the base's conditions, and Gen. Richard
Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, traveled to the detention
facility, known as "Camp X-Ray," by plane, boat and bus, accompanied
by four senators: Democrats Dianne Feinstein of California, and Daniel Inouye of
Hawaii, and Republicans Ted Stevens of Alaska, and Kay Bailey Hutchison of
Texas.
They
came to get a firsthand look at the facilities and procedures used in handling
the 158 prisoners being detained in 8-by-8 foot, open air cells, as Rumsfeld
walked through an area of the camp and got to see many of the detainees in their
cells.
The
U.S. military has temporarily suspended prisoner transfers from Afghanistan,
though officials have strenuously denied that the halt came in response to
mounting criticism, including from European allies, about mistreatment of the
detainees.
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