THE US: "Follow the Geneva Convention," the Washington Post editorialised last week on the Guantanamo prisoners. Patrick Smyth, Washington Correspondent, found much media upset on the prisoner issue
The Post suggested that while the paper found the physical treatment of the prisoners reflected "reasonable security measures more than punitive actions", the "detainees cannot as a group be designated unlawful combatants by the Secretary of Defence". Until their status is determined by legal tribunal they must all be treated as POWs, the paper said.
"The Geneva Convention and other international treaties ratified by the United States give the detainees specific rights, rights that the Bush administration should respect," it said.
The preoccupation with the prisoners' status rather than their comfort is shared by many US papers, but not the Wall Street Journal.
A bastion of conservatism, it was yesterday at its most vitriolic, loading on the irony in inveighing against Brtish criticism of the US in the European edition: "In a farcical example of life imitating art, the critics seem to believe that the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base is some kind of offshore torture chamber run by the real-life counterpart of sneering Marine Colonel Nathan Jessup played by Jack Nicholson in the movie A Few Good Men. ("You want the truth?" Nicholson growls, "You can't handle the truth!")
"The charges of mistreatment strike us as numbingly absurd. An airplane full of potential human bombs - men who, as Joint Chiefs Chairman Richard Myers put it, metaphorically, 'would chew through the hydraulic \ wires of a C-17 to bring it down' - are not given window seats. That's an abuse of human rights?"
American readers got more of the same in an attack on what the paper saw as the warped values of Human Rights Watch: "Judging from the latest survey by Human Rights Watch, the world might have been better off had the Taliban liberated Washington, DC, instead... It harks back to the kind of left-wing moral equivalence we haven't seen since the fall of the Berlin Wall."
The Sun Sentinel from Florida advised the government to pay heed to its international critics: "The Pentagon insists the Geneva Conventions technically do not apply in this case. Whether that's true or not, the US should do its best to comply with them without losing its ability to protect Americans from further attacks.
"Failure to respect international standards for the treatment of war prisoners would only work against the United States, both by turning world opinion against its war on terrorism and by giving hostile nations an excuse to mistreat American prisoners.
" Thus far the US treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo has been humane and lawful. That shouldn't change, and there's no reason to think it will."
The New York Times has yet to editorialise on the issue but has carried an opinion piece by the director of Amnesty and has reported European and rights' groups criticisms extensively.
The Economist insists the US must make its intentions clear quickly.
"What it must not do is to make no choice at all, leaving the prisoners indefinitely beyond the reach of any legal regime. This would put America - pre-eminently a nation of laws - itself outside the law.
"It would also undermine its rightful claim to be fighting for justice and civilised values against a foe who respects neither."
The Rocky Mountain News warns of the need for care in bringing the prisoners out of Afghanistan.
"Once they're here we could be stuck with them; if no other nation will accept them, we can't deport them."
Relevant websites (subscription needed in some cases):
www.washingtonpost.com public.wsj.com/home
www.sun-sentinel.com
www.economist.com
www.nytimes.com
www.rockymountainnews.com