Geneva or Abu Ghraib?

THE PENTAGON wants to have it both ways. It intends to provide new training in core values to its troops after reports of an alleged massacre of Iraqi civilians by Marines, but it also wants to ignore a Geneva Convention rule against "humiliating and degrading treatment" of prisoners. This mixed message can only complicate the decision-making of US personnel at the same time it further tarnishes the international reputation of the United States.

The Geneva Convention rule that the Defense Department wants to exempt troops from is Article 3. Unlike other rules that pertain only to detainees with prisoner-of-war status, Article 3 also covers the kind of captives categorized by the Pentagon as unlawful combatants.

According to the Los Angeles Times, the move to keep Article 3 out of policy directives came from the chief of staff of Vice President Dick Cheney, David S. Addington, and the Pentagon's undersecretary for intelligence, Stephen A. Cambone . They believe that including the ban on humiliating and degrading treatment would hamstring interrogations of insurgents or terrorism suspects.

In 2002, President Bush suspended portions of the Geneva Conventions for captured Al Qaeda and Taliban members, a decision that has been tied by human-rights advocates to the abuse of detainees at Guantanamo Bay and the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

Support for the restoration of Article 3 to the still unpublished directives has come from military lawyers and from the State Department. Lawyers and military commanders worry that weakening the Geneva Conventions in this way could undermine the United States globally if other nations take it as the basis of protection for all detained combatants, including US personnel.

The State Department is concerned that such a formal disavowal of the international code for prisoner protection would feed criticism abroad of US conduct in the Iraqi war and the war against terrorism. Recently, the attorney general of Washington's closest ally in Iraq, Great Britain, the chancellor of Germany, and the prime minister of Denmark have all called on the United States to close Guantanamo. Iraq's prime minister last week harshly criticized the American military for causing the deaths of many innocent Iraqi civilians.

The United States does not improve its standing with either its allies or, more crucially, the Iraqi people when the Pentagon undercuts the Geneva Conventions and Bush says he reserves the right to ignore a law passed by Congress banning torture of detainees, including unlawful combatants. These are not instances of the terrorists winning, so much as they are of the United States losing -- the decent opinion of mankind.