The International Committee of the Red Cross and Guantánamo Bay

The Geneva Convention gives the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) a mandate to visit prisoners of war and ensure that they are not mistreated. The ICRC has been visiting detainees at the Guantánamo Bay detention centre since its inception, but it reports any concerns privately to the US government. It is ICRC policy that its reports not be made public, in exchange for full access to prisoners. However, a 2004 report by the ICRC on Guantánamo was leaked to the New York Times, at the time of the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal. The report stated that interrogation techniques used at Guantánamo were "tantamount to torture".

In 2002, the US government declared itself exempt from obligations to treat detainees in accordance with the Geneva Convention. A White House press 'fact sheet' (http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/02/20020207-13.html) stated that "Al-Qaida is not a state party to the Geneva Convention; it is a foreign terrorist group. As such, its members are not entitled to POW status." This position is reiterated in the leaked document Welcome Foreign Attache Visitors (to Iraq) (See 'Key Definitions' in the Introduction). The press 'fact sheet' continued: "Even though the detainees are not entitled to POW privileges, they will be provided many POW privileges as a matter of policy... The International Committee of the Red Cross has visited and will continue to be able to visit the detainees privately."

This claim is directly contradicted by both of the documents obtained by Wikileaks, Camp Delta SOP (2003) and Camp Delta SOP (2004). There it is revealed that some detainees are classified as being permitted "No Access: No contact of any kind with ICRC. This includes delivery of ICRC mail."

The US government cited the ICRC visits as evidence that prisoners were not being mistreated at Guantánamo, despite the ICRC's repeated (private) reports to the contrary. Now we find that some prisoners were kept even from the ICRC's gaze. It is not clear from the ICRC's 2004 Annual Report whether the ICRC knew this. Their more immediate concern was for the prisoners in the CIA's 'black site' prisons, to whom they were granted no access at all.