Jan. 10, 2004
By MATT KELLEY, Associated Press Writer
Photo: This picture made available by the US army shows ousted Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein just after his capture 13 December 2003. The US declared that Hussein is a prisoner of war (AFP/HO-US Army/File)
WASHINGTON - Saddam Hussein has been a prisoner of war since his capture last month, Pentagon lawyers have determined. Despite that determination, Secretary of State Colin Powell said Friday he knows of no formal declaration that the deposed Iraqi dictator is a POW.
That decision, Powell said, will be up to the Defense Department. Whether Saddam is a prisoner of war could be key to how he is treated in captivity and eventually put on trial. The Geneva Conventions on treatment of prisoners of war forbid any kind of coercion in POW interrogations, for example.
The United States says Saddam's government killed at least 300,000 Iraqis, including an estimated 5,000 members of the Kurdish minority in a poison gas attack in 1988. U.S. officials have said they plan to turn Saddam over to an Iraqi court for trial.
But the Geneva agreements say POWs can be tried for crimes against humanity only by an international tribunal or the occupying power, which in Iraq is the United States.
POW status also would entitle Saddam to meet with representatives from the International Committee of the Red Cross. A spokesman for the ICRC in Geneva, Ian Piper, said Saturday a visit with the former Iraqi leader had been requested but has yet to occur. Some human rights groups have complained that other top former Iraqi officials in U.S. custody have not been given access to Red Cross representatives.
Powell said, "We are certainly treating everybody in our custody in accordance with basic rights and expectations of international agreements that we have."
About Saddam's trial, he said, "We believe the credibility of the new Iraqi government will be measured by how they handle this horrible dictator."
He did not deal with the question of war crimes jurisdiction.
Saddam is being held at an undisclosed location and interrogated by the Central Intelligence Agency. Iraqi officials say he is being held in the Baghdad area.
In London, a senior British official said Saddam has given no useful information to his interrogators. The official, who briefed journalists on condition of anonymity, said U.S. authorities were taking their time questioning Saddam in the hope that he might eventually open up.
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Tuesday that Saddam and all Iraqi captives are being treated in compliance with the Geneva Conventions. He said Saddam's legal status was being reviewed by several U.S. agencies, and no determination had been made.
The general counsel office in the Pentagon, the Defense Department's top civilian lawyers, has determined that Saddam is a prisoner of war because of his status as former commander in chief of Iraq's military, spokesman Maj. Michael Shavers said Friday. The lawyers determined that no formal declaration of Saddam's status was needed, he said.
Some Iraqis in Baghdad were disappointed by the decision to grant Saddam prisoner of war status, fearing it was a move to deny Iraqi courts the chance to try him for crimes against the Iraqi people.
"The are considering him a POW in order to have a legal excuse to keep him with them away from the hands of Iraqis," taxi driver Imad Abbas said. "I don't think they will hand him for Iraqis for investigation lest he should reveal previous contacts with them."
Many Iraqis suspect that the United States secretly used Saddam to promote U.S. interests in the Middle East, especially during the 1980s when the West armed Iraq to help defend against Iran during the Iran-Iraq war.
"Saddam has special importance for the Americans as he gave them the master key of the Middle East," Jamal al-Bayati, a house painter, said. "He should be a war criminal rather than a prisoner of war."
Ibrahim al-Basri, a physician, said he believed POW status was part of "a bargain between Saddam and the United States."
"He handed them Iraq," al-Basri said. "If the Americans wanted to clone an agent to serve them, they wouldn't find a better one than Saddam. He brought the Americans to the Gulf, divided the Arabs, destroyed Iraq and its weapons, threatened Syria and Iran."
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