Double standards?

By Salama A Salama

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The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) is so concerned with Saddam Hussein's fate it has called on the American authorities to release him so long as he has not been charged -- a demand which is all the more surprising in light of its silence regarding dozens of reports of human rights abuses in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.

It has been suggested that when it became aware of such abuses, the ICRC was content to report them to the relevant higher authorities, following its convention of refraining from conflict with governments.

Yet aside from the fact that its current reaction breaches that convention, such vociferous concern for Saddam Hussein makes no provisions for the fate of his 55 aides, nor that of hundreds of Iraqi scientists and officials who have not been heard of since they were arrested and freighted to American prisons.

It remains to be seen whether Saddam is the scapegoat Washington now offers the new Iraqi government in order to wash its hands of his trial as a war criminal, which threatens to expose the secrets of clandestine American-Iraqi collaborations of the past.

What the evidence indicates beyond any shadow of doubt is that the American administration has been implementing a systematic programme of torture which, though only recently and coincidentally uncovered, had been agreed on since 2002, with President George W Bush, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and every relevant official from the top down whole-heartedly working procedurally according to a specific set of rules endorsing the brutal treatment of prisoners.

Reports of no longer deniable abuses seem to have besieged the White House, the guilt edging closer and closer to President Bush, whose legal advisers had to seek out a legal outlet to protect him against the prospect of trial for war crimes, since the US president is by default the country's highest military authority.

American tailor-made-lawmakers -- for the business of tailoring laws to the government's convenience is not an exclusively Egyptian profession -- have argued for prioritising "national security" over both American law and international conventions regulating the treatment of prisoners of war. Hence US and UK opposition to the terms stipulating that the occupation forces should treat prisoners humanely in accordance with international law during UN Security Council meetings on Iraq.

Amnesty International's emphatic protests notwithstanding, the ICRC, which as an international party remains ethically responsible, must adopt a clearer, more decisive position on such serious abuses, which can only perpetuate the culture of abuse and torture throughout the world, and especially in this part of it.