US Guilty of Prisoner Abuses - Red Cross

Recently, The News International, Pakistan's largest English daily quoted an International Committee of the Red Cross report on Guantanamo Bay detainees as saying:

“The CIA’s secret interrogation programme amounted to torture for some of the 14 “high-value detainees” held by the agency, according to published excerpts of an internal 2006 report by the International Committee of the Red Cross.”

ICRC is a Swiss-based non-profit and neutral organization designated by the Geneva Conventions on warfare to monitor the treatment of prisoners of war by an occupying force. They are also expected to ensure that the governments do not violate international rules and obligations they pledged under the 1949 accords of Geneva Convention.

Mark DMark Danner, professor at the University of California at Berkeley, had recently obtained a copy of the report from ICRC and published some excerpts to the New York Review of Books in their recent April publication.

The report indicates that the prisoners separately and consistently described long-term solitary confinement, waterboarding - which simulates drowning – prolonged stress positions, forced prolonged nudity, beatings, denial of solid food and other forms of abuse.

A similar report of torture in Abu Gharaib was leaked by ICRC shortly before the abuses became public. The report had clearly indicated in 2003 that “some prisoners in US custody in Iraq had been abused in ways that in some cases was tantamount to torture.”

One of the major reasons for the failure of America's War on Terror has been their double standards towards human rights. While they claim Alqaida and others to not care about human rights, yet, they themselves take away the rights from all those they come under direct contact.

Hundreds of prisoners were sent to Guantanamo Bay, and thousands to foreign prisons like Abu Gharaib. Almost all the detainees never got to see a lawyer or a even told their rights. Many will never see the daylight and will never know why they were caught yet continue to live under inhuman conditions.

US forces have also increased their attacks on high valued targets through drone attacks in Pakistan and Afghanistan. In each of these attacks, more civilians, including women and children, get maimed and killed than any Taliban or Alqaeda operatives. These attacks show the inhuman side to the war as American diplomats and military simply declares these victims as “accepted civilian losses”. It is astonishing to see this double standard where an American life is considered valuable, yet the lives of poor farmers of rural Pakistan and Afghanistan are considered worthless. This apartheid has further aggravated hatred towards the War on Terror.

It is quite clear that if America wants to make any significant progress towards normalcy in the Middle East, it needs to show it in their treatment of individuals that they come in direct contact with.