What Constitutes a POW?
There are rules and laws pertaining to people captured on a battlefield, and no doubt experts of all stripes will read between the lines and commas to make whatever point they want regarding the people held in Camp X-Ray. We, ourselves, are sympathetic to the White House/DoD position and do not consider the detainees from Afghanistan to be POWs. We bring to your attention a letter that appeared in USA Today last week making the case more eloquently than we could that the rules and laws are often honored in the breech.
Cuba Based Captives are Not POWs.
There are rules and laws pertaining to people captured on a battlefield, and no doubt experts of all stripes will read between the lines and commas to make whatever point they want regarding the people held in Camp X-Ray. We, ourselves, are sympathetic to the White House/DoD position and do not consider the detainees from Afghanistan to be POWs. We bring to your attention a letter that appeared in USA Today last week making the case more eloquently than we could that the rules and laws are often honored in the breech.
Cuba Based Captives are Not POWs.
When my husband, U.S. Marine Col. William R. ”Rich” Higgins, was captured by radical Islamic terrorists in Lebanon in 1988, our country never called him a ”prisoner of war,” but maintained he was a ”detainee.”
I’d like to believe that if those same officials were in the government today, things might have been different. Had my late husband been declared a POW, our country could have insisted on ”humane treatment and certain accommodations” (” ‘POW’ has legal rights; a ‘detainee’ might not,” USA Today News, Tuesday 21 January 2002).
I always thought of my husband as a prisoner of war. After all, he met the ”traditional definition” of a POW, according to the unnamed officials quoted in USA Today’s article: He wore a uniform, had a ”recognized hierarchy” and subscribed ”to the international norms of warfare” – although as a United Nations peacekeeper, he was unarmed.
I know that even as he was dying of torture, abandoned by the Red Cross and the United Nations, he thought of himself as a POW. I’m also sure he thought his country did, too. The terrorists being held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, are not POWs. Col. Higgins was.
Robin Higgins © Copyright 2001 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.
The detainees are not guests. They are men who have proven dangerous to themselves and others, and they may have information important to America’s war against terrorists and those who support them. We are not saying that “turn about” is fair play; we do expect the United States to adhere to standards more humane and more rigorously protective of human rights than we expect of others. But since the captured individuals are receiving three meals a day, medical care, clothing, shelter, bathing facilities and opportunities for prayer – including the importation of a Muslim chaplain – the American government would seem to have more than met its obligations.