According to Sec Rumsfeld, Saddam is not a POW.
He is being provided the same protections of the
Geneva Accords as a POW.
Why does the US regard the overthrown despot of Iraq to be a POW? And don't say it's because he is a prisoner seized as part of the United States' "war on terror" because it won't wash. We, Britain, have been fighting that war for decades, while the US was still playing at soldiers in the Nevada desert. But we don't accord POW status to those we arrest in our fight against terrorism.
1. There was no formal declaration of war against Iraq, and the US-led campaign was not against that country. It was only to overthrow a dictatorship. This is the same thing as when the alliance went up against the Taliban and its supporters, many of them now incarcerated and denied basic legal rights and status at Guantanamo.
2. There was no authority from the United Nations to "enforce" its resolution, indeed the US were expressly told to back off. So, since there is no lawful authority the US can claim to have in support of its attack on Iraq, doesn't that make every US service personnel there an "unlawful combatant" by its own definition of the term? In which case why aren't they being transported to Guantanamo and held there in the same conditions as your enemies?
3. If this is all part of the United States own private "war on terror" - a pseudo expression invented to excuse US anti-Muslim aggression in the world, then so is the campaign in Afghanistan. Since prisoners taken there are not POWs, and since they are treated so abhorrently, how can the US give a prisoner taken in Iraq status as a POW? He was not captured in uniform, he is not the head of state. He is a fugitive on the run from his own country, and a terrorist who is encouraging either directly or by his presence, acts of violence against the Iraqi people.
4. Saddam's offences are against his own people, and Iraq. They are not against America, or even the UN, since no WMD have been found so that charge is not proven. This makes him a common criminal, subject to the due process of his own country. Since America accepts Iraq jurisdiction in this matter, how can he ever be a POW, when his offences are against local criminal law and not the accepted rules of war?
America, you can't have it all ways just to suit your personal expansionist ambitions. If Saddam is a POW, then so are all the people held at Guantanamo. And if they are not and won't ever be, then neither is Saddam, and he should now join them there in the same conditions.
Your administration's hypocrisy is shameful, and demonstrates to the world yet again, that it has no sense of honour or integrity, and that it will twist the rules, or invent its own, to suit its own purposes. Its lack of consistency brings into question, the truth behind its military actions across the world, and casts a shadow over the whole nation.
Now Saddam is captured, Bush is the biggest despot on the planet. US military threats against other sovereign states is as much an act of terrorism, as the action of a suicide bomber. So go arrest George W Bush, your own President, as part of your so-called "war against terror". Prove to us that nobody is above the law, and that the United States knows the meaning of evenhanded justice, instead of being the bully boy of the world.
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