The international outcry over the display of American casualties and
prisoners on Iraqi state television is thoroughly justified. . . .
Mr Bush's words rang just a little hollow. The fact is that Iraqis
are not the only foreign combatants in US custody. When the military
operation against Iraq began, the US was already holding more than
600 foreign prisoners in camps in Guantanamo Bay, its base in Cuba.
. . .
There were times, especially at the start, when the prisoners at
Guantanamo Bay came very close to being paraded before television
cameras. They were shown in conditions that seemed designed to
humiliate, confined to metal cages, led hooded and blindfolded to
interrogation sessions that were not, and could not, be monitored.
The American authorities resisted all efforts by foreign governments
and human rights organisations to have their "detainees", as they
termed them, recognised as prisoners of war and so subject to the
provisions of the Geneva Convention. . . .
FULL TEXT
[The Pentagon said that a "gap" in the laws governing warfare made
it legally permissible during the gulf war for U.S. tanks to bury
thousands of Iraqi troops in their trenches and for U.S.
warplanes to bomb the enemy retreating along the so-called Highway
of Death. . . .
Newsday disclosed in September that many Iraqi troops were buried
alive when the First Mechanized Infantry Division attacked an
8,000-man division defending Saddam Hussein's front line.--"U.S. Defends
Burying Iraqi Troops Alive," San Francisco Chronicle, July 1992]
[Americans have made it a point to keep at a distance while
inflicting some of the greatest horrors of the age: atomic bombs on
the people of Japan; carpet-bombing Korea back to the stone age;
engulfing the Vietnamese in napalm and pesticides; providing three
decades of Latin Americans with the tools and methods of torture,
then turning their eyes away, closing their ears to the screams, and
denying everything . . . and now, dropping 177 million pounds of
bombs on the people of Iraq in the most concentrated aerial
onslaught in the history of the world. . . .
Tanks pulling plows moved alongside trenches, firing into the Iraqi
soldiers inside the trenches as the plows covered them with great
mounds of sand. Thousands were buried, dead, wounded, or
alive.--William Blum, Killing Hope, 1995]
"Afghan Massacre: The Convoy of
Death," ACFTV, February 4, 2003
[The cynicism of Rumsfeld is unbelievable! You mention Guantanamo,
but a far greater war crime was the treatment of German prisoners of
war at the end of WWII. Eisenhower, who hated Germans, had them
"reclassified" from POWs to "disarmed enemy forces" so they would
not be subject to the Geneva Convention. Thousands of them were kept
in barbed wire enclosures in meadows on the Rhine near Remagen, with
no shelter and almost no food. They were eating grass to stay alive.
James Bacque in his book "Other Losses" claims that up to 1,000,000
died in this and other POW "camps". We set the example for violating
prisoners' human rights and "war crimes" relating to their
treatment.--Burgess
Jamieson, ex 1st.Lt., US Army]
