The new Pentagon manual will exclude a key tenet of the Geneva Convention that explicitly bans "humiliating and degrading treatment".

CAIRO – In a shift from strict adherence to international human rights standards, the Pentagon has decided to omit a key tenet of the Geneva Convention that explicitly bans "humiliating and degrading treatment" of detainees from its new manual, an American newspaper reported on Monday, June 5.

"The overall thinking is that they need the flexibility to apply cruel techniques if military necessity requires it," an official familiar with a Pentagon debate on detainees' treatment told the Los Angeles Times.

For more than a year, the Pentagon has been redrawing its policies on treatment of prisoners.

It intends to issue a new Army Field Manual on interrogation which, along with accompanying directives, represents core instructions to US troops around the world.

The detainee directive is due to be released next September.

It was initially planned for late April but delayed after several Senators objected to provisions allowing harsher interrogation techniques for those considered unlawful combatants.

Abu Ghraib abuse scandal exploded onto the world stage after the CBS news network published several graphic photos of Iraqi detainees tortured and sexually abused by US soldiers.

Human Rights Watch has described the abuses at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison as just the "tip of the iceberg" of US mistreatment of Muslim prisoners.

It released a summary of evidence of US abuse of detainees in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, as well as of the programs of secret CIA detention, and renditions.

Major Shift

The exclusion of Geneva Convention protections marks a major policy shift for the US.

For decades, it had been the official policy of the US military to follow the minimum standards for treating all detainees as laid out in the Geneva Convention.

But after the 9/11 attacks, the Bush administration suspended portion of the Geneva Convention for capturing what it describes as "terror suspects".

Among the directives being rewritten is one governing US detention operations.

Military lawyers and other defense officials have pressed for redrawing version of the document known as DoD Directive 2310, to again embrace Common Article 3 of the Geneva Convention.

That provision — known as a "common" article as it is part of each of the 1949 four Geneva pacts — bans torture and cruel treatment.

Unlike other Geneva provisions, Article 3 covers all detainees — whether they are held as unlawful combatants or traditional prisoners of war.

But the move to restore US adherence to Article 3 was opposed by officials from Vice President Dick Cheney's office and the Pentagon's intelligence arm, according to government sources.

Opposition

The US State Department has fiercely opposed the exclusion of Geneva Convention protections and has been pushing for the Pentagon and the White House to reconsider their position.

It maintains that adopting Article 3 would put the US government on more solid "moral footing," and make US policies easier to defend abroad.

The State Department also believes that incorporating Geneva into the new directive would show American allies that the US military is following "common standards" rather than making up its own rules.

"The rest of the world is completely convinced that we are busy torturing people," said Oona A. Hathaway, an expert in international law at Yale Law School.

"Whether that is true or not, the fact we keep refusing to provide these protections in our formal directives puts a lot of fuel on the fire."