The Red Cross has been politicized.

Red Double Cross

A politicized ICRC won't help prisoners get better treatment.

Pentagon critics are treating a leaked Red Cross assessment--first reported in The Wall Street Journal last Friday--as proof that detainee abuse was widespread in Iraq and that the military was unresponsive to complaints. After reading the report, we think the real story is the increasing politicization of this venerable humanitarian group.

We say this with regret, because it would be a real shame if the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) became just another left-wing advocacy group along the lines of Human Rights Watch or Amnesty International. This would ruin its long-held status as trusted and neutral guardian of the Geneva Conventions around the world, but that's the path it is now on.

The core of the Red Cross method has been its scrupulous adherence to confidentiality agreements with the governments whose work it monitors. This approach has obvious drawbacks. But confidentiality has gotten the ICRC remarkable access and--as countless prisoners over the years have testified--has improved conditions for detainees of regimes not known for brooking public criticism. The ICRC held its tongue even as it worked in Nazi Germany and during its 23-year mission in Saddam Hussein's Iraq.
So it is more than a little disconcerting, and politically suspicious, that a report now leaks criticizing the United States, of all countries. We'd take ICRC President Jakob Kellenberger's protest that he was "profoundly disturbed" by the leak a bit more seriously if his organization had not rushed to confirm the authenticity of the document and then hold a press conference about it.

Or, for that matter, if the ICRC had not already picked an unprecedented public fight with the U.S. over the Guantanamo detainees. The Red Cross was upset from the start that the Bush Administration didn't grant the detainees "prisoner of war" status, never mind that their terrorist nature is clearly a break from the kind of war rules under which the Red Cross has typically operated. For example, none of the detainees met such Geneva Convention criteria as fighting in uniform and belonging to a military organization with an identifiable command structure that is itself committed to upholding the laws of war.

The Pentagon did pledge to grant the Gitmo detainees many POW privileges, if not formal POW status. And the ICRC was allowed to inspect the facility. But it kicked up a major fuss anyway.

We wonder how many Americans on the right or left would have been sympathetic to this ICRC complaint if they understood that POWs are required to give only name, rank and ID number. Or that the Geneva Conventions forbid even positive reinforcements such as better rations to coax information from POWs.

In other words, had Donald Rumsfeld agreed to ICRC terms at Gitmo, we wouldn't have been able to interrogate these men in hopes of thwarting the next 9/11. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of 9/11 who was arrested in Pakistan and is being held in an undisclosed location under non-POW rules, would also be off limits to serious interrogation.

The ICRC's leaked report shows that the organization has committed itself to similarly extreme positions with regard to Iraq. Contrary to much of the spin, the report acknowledges that "ill-treatment during interrogation was not systematic" for most prisoners, and that "abusive behavior by guards . . . was usually quickly reprimanded."
The report's complaints are mostly directed at the treatment of "high value" detainees, meaning the worst Baathist or jihadi offenders. Some of the concerns they raise are a legitimate and helpful check on U.S. officials. But as with Gitmo, the ICRC is also promulgating a no-interrogation standard that would severely compromise the U.S. counterinsurgency effort. The ICRC demands an end to "all forms of ill-treatment, moral or physical coercion" and a respect for detainees' "psychological integrity." It even complains about "frequent cursing."

If the ICRC wants to promote such standards honestly, fine. But then it shouldn't pretend that it is promoting anything to do with settled international law. We refer the ICRC to Article 64 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which gives an occupying power broad policing authority. How many people would find the Red Cross position acceptable if they understood it would forbid even psychological pressure on a deputy of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi to reveal his boss's whereabouts?

The rise of terrorism and so-called asymmetric warfare only reinforces the wisdom of making distinctions between legitimate POWs and unlawful combatants. It also demands that the ICRC tread carefully with respect to governments that, whatever their faults, will make good faith efforts to play by the rules. It can hardly help the cause of human rights for the decapitators of Nicholas Berg to watch this ICRC report spun to give the U.S. a black eye, while these killers do not grant their prisoners any Red Cross access to be leaked about.

The Abu Ghraib offenders should be punished under normal military standards, but the uproar over their behavior shouldn't be used to undermine the U.S. ability to gather intelligence legitimately under international law. Yet both the fact and timing of the ICRC report's release seem to have been designed to achieve precisely that purpose: hit the Pentagon at a politically vulnerable time in the hope that it concedes.

This ICRC behavior poses a serious risk to its relationship with governments around the world, as well as to its special status when there are future revisions of the Geneva Conventions. We hope that some adults inside the organization understand this, because the ICRC's self-inflicted demise would be a real loss for prisoners of regimes that are truly odious.