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Obama must change policy on prisoners of war

President Barack Obama won’t be able to mess things up as rapidly as his critics fear. And he won’t be able to repair the nation’s ills as fast as his supporters hope.

But he can act immediately in one area, on his own, at little cost: He can restore common sense to the way we handle prisoners.

The Obama camp already has vowed to shut down the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

That’s a great start, but today’s policy on prisoners involves more than the place the U.S. government holds detainees. It remains the same policy announced by former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld — the 1949 Geneva Convention on Prisoners of War applies to prisoners taken in Iraq but not to detainees in captured in Afghanistan.

According to some legal experts, the Taliban and al-Qaida were not entitled to Geneva treatment because of the way they were fighting.

But even if current policy were legal — and I won’t concede that — it tarnishes our image around the world. Worse, the policy raises questions about how U.S. troops will be treated when captured in future conflicts. It’s time to apply the Geneva Convention to all war prisoners. Obama can do so the instant he takes office. He needs no legislation from Congress.

Restoring the Geneva Convention would require:

1. Releasing prisoners who are not our enemies:

There is strong evidence that some of those held in Gitmo were never our foes. Arrangements must be made to free them. We also have a strong moral obligation to help resettle them.

2. Granting prisoner-of-war status to those who are our enemies but haven’t committed war crimes:

Fighting American troops on the battlefield, even killing them, is not a war crime. We must release POWs’ names. We must repatriate them when the war ends.

3 Using the U.S. criminal justice system to prosecute those accused of war crimes:

The “military commissions” that the administration created as a substitute for civilian courtroom trials are not working. Eight years in the making and only now getting underway, they lack credibility with Americans and with people in other countries.

Another change the new president must make, and one on which both candidates agreed, is an end to torture.

This is one issue we can all agree on. We can begin the long, slow process of repairing our tarnished image in the world. We can make our conduct of military operations legal again.

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The writer, an Air Force veteran, lives in Oakton, Va. He is co-author of “Hell Hawks,” a history of an American fighter group in World War II. His e-mail address is robert.f.dorr@cox.net