The UN's moral blindness: Gitmo and torture

The UN report calling for the US to shut down the Guantanamo Bay detainee camp is full of the usual incorrect and morally reprehensible characterizations that have clouded the perceptions of the UN and Europeans on this issue.

First, the facts:

(1) EACH AND EVERY DETAINEE is a person captured on or about a field of battle and did not have any uniform, responsible national authority and is not entitled to the protections of a prisoner of war under the Third Geneva Convention. Instead, each could have been shot as a spy at the time of capture.

(2) Torture has a specific definition in the United Nations Convention Against Torture or Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment and the US subjected itself to the UNCAT only as to its torture provisions.

Now the key findings by the UN: (a) that the Gitmo detention "amount[s] to torture" and that, in the words of its investigator for torture Manfred Nowak

Those people should be released or brought before an independent court. That should not be done in Guantanamo Bay, but before ordinary U.S. courts, or courts in their countries of origin or perhaps an international tribunal.

In other words, terrorists now should have rights above and beyond the rights of prisoners of war, countries no longer have the right to protect themselves from terrorists by holding them until the end of hostilities, and fighting terrorism is merely a police action. This is a morally reprehensible formulation because it gives TERRORISTS far more rights than legitimate combatants.

It is also morally foolish because either the terrorists at Gitmo are being actually tortured by infliction of pain or mental distress, or they are not. Unlike Saddam's victims in his jails, torture chambers and rape closets, the Gitmo detainees are kept in humane cells, fed regularly (many GAINED weight!), allowed to worship and provided with Korans.

Furthermore, Nowak's conceptualization of the situation is intellectually deficient: there is no treatment that would "amount to torture" -- that's equivalent to "nearly pregnant" or "slightly dead".

President Bush should reject the conclusions out of hand. And the US should start forcing the UN to comply with its own Geneva Convention language.