ASHINGTON, Jan. 27 ?Vice President Dick Cheney and
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said today that the war
captives in Afghanistan and Guant?amo Bay, Cuba, would not be
designated as prisoners of war, regardless of what decision the
administration made on Secretary of State Colin L. Powell's request
for a review of how the Geneva Convention on captives' rights might
apply.
Secretary Powell agrees that the captives should not be given
prisoner of war status, but he has asked the administration to
reconsider whether to adhere to the Geneva Convention governing
treatment of prisoners in wartime, adopted in 1949.
Mr. Cheney said the convention did not apply to those captives
because they were not conventional soldiers, but terrorists
operating outside internationally accepted norms.
Reflecting a debate within the administration, Mr. Cheney told
Fox News this morning that the question was whether the prisoners
should be treated within the confines of the convention or outside
it. He prefers the latter course because it would allow flexibility
in interrogation.
"There's another school of thought that says the Geneva
Convention does not apply to terrorist attacks," Mr. Cheney said.
"It was set up to deal with a war between sovereign states. It's got
provisions for dealing with civil war. But in a case where you have
nonstate actors out to kill civilians, then there's a serious
question whether or not the Geneva Convention even applies.
"The bottom line is that the legal issue is being debated between
the lawyers. It will go to the president. He'll make a
decision."
"The detainees are being treated humanely," he said, adding:
"These are the worst of a very bad lot. 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."
The convention says that if there is doubt about prisoners'
status, "such persons shall enjoy the protection of the present
convention until such time as their status has been determined by a
competent tribunal."
Mr. Rumsfeld told reporters traveling with him today to
Guant?amo, "There is no ambiguity in this case."
"They are not P.O.W.'s," he said before touring the United States
naval base at Guant?amo, where 158 prisoners from Afghanistan are
being held. "They will not be determined to be P.O.W.'s."
Mr. Rumsfeld said he was touring the detention center, known as
Camp X-Ray, not so much to inspect the conditions as to buck up the
troops who are guarding the prisoners, whom he called "among the
most dangerous, best trained, vicious killers on the face of the
earth."
Officials at the camp told reporters that the prisoners were
already beginning to organize themselves, with some emerging as
leaders.
Later, on CNN's "Late Edition," Mr. Cheney discussed the legal
debate within the administration and suggested that the State
Department's view, that the captives should be treated within the
confines of the Geneva Convention, would be rejected. "There is a
category under the Geneva Convention for unlawful combatants, and
one argument, the State Department argument, is they ought to be
treated within the Geneva Convention but under that convention
deemed unlawful combatants and therefore not ?they don't extend to
the rights of a prisoner of war," he said. "The other argument is
the Geneva Convention doesn't apply in the case of terrorism, and
that leads you down a different track from a legal standpoint.
"The ultimate result is they will be treated humanely, but they
are not going to be accorded the treatment you would accord, for
example, the Iraqis that we captured in the gulf war, who were
treated ?a prisoner of war, for example, has to give only name, rank
and serial number.
"These are bad people. I mean, they've already been screened
before they get to Guant?amo. They may well have information about
future terrorist attacks against the United States. We need that
information. We need to be able to interrogate them and extract from
them whatever information they have."
