Both Rumsfeld and "president" Bush should be tried as war criminals.
The nations of the world should demand that they take responsibility.
Rumsfeld has said the US doesn't need to follow the Geneva
Conventions. Bush justified a war in Iraq based on weapons of mass
destruction. Both of them are evil, and have few morals.
I am ashamed to be an American -- I thought our country represented
human rights, morality, and proper justice. I hope those in power go
down in disgrace.
Here is an article from the Washington Post:
Mr. Rumsfeld's Responsibility
Thursday, May 6, 2004; Page A34
THE HORRIFIC abuses by American interrogators and guards at the Abu
Ghraib prison and at other facilities maintained by the U.S. military
in Iraq and Afghanistan can be traced, in part, to policy decisions
and public statements of Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld.
Beginning more than two years ago, Mr. Rumsfeld decided to overturn
decades of previous practice by the U.S. military in its handling of
detainees in foreign countries. His Pentagon ruled that the United
States would no longer be bound by the Geneva Conventions; that Army
regulations on the interrogation of prisoners would not be observed;
and that many detainees would be held incommunicado and without any
independent mechanism of review. Abuses will take place in any prison
system. But Mr. Rumsfeld's decisions helped create a lawless regime in
which prisoners in both Iraq and Afghanistan have been humiliated,
beaten, tortured and murdered -- and in which, until recently, no one
has been held accountable.
The lawlessness began in January 2002 when Mr. Rumsfeld publicly
declared that hundreds of people detained by U.S. and allied forces in
Afghanistan "do not have any rights" under the Geneva Conventions.
That was not the case: At a minimum, all those arrested in the war
zone were entitled under the conventions to a formal hearing to
determine whether they were prisoners of war or unlawful combatants.
No such hearings were held, but then Mr. Rumsfeld made clear that U.S.
observance of the convention was now optional. Prisoners, he said,
would be treated "for the most part" in "a manner that is reasonably
consistent" with the conventions -- which, the secretary breezily
suggested, was outdated.
In one important respect, Mr. Rumsfeld was correct: Not only could
captured al Qaeda members be legitimately deprived of Geneva
Convention guarantees (once the required hearing was held) but such
treatment was in many cases necessary to obtain vital intelligence and
prevent terrorists from communicating with confederates abroad. But if
the United States was to resort to that exceptional practice, Mr.
Rumsfeld should have established procedures to ensure that it did so
without violating international conventions against torture and that
only suspects who truly needed such extraordinary handling were
treated that way. Outside controls or independent reviews could have
provided such safeguards. Instead, Mr. Rumsfeld allowed detainees to
be indiscriminately designated as beyond the law -- and made humane
treatment dependent on the goodwill of U.S. personnel.
Much of what has happened at the U.S. detention center in Guantanamo
Bay is shrouded in secrecy. But according to an official Army report,
a system was established at the camp under which military guards were
expected to "set the conditions" for intelligence investigations. The
report by Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba says the system was later
introduced at military facilities at Bagram airbase in Afghanistan and
the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, even though it violates Army
regulations forbidding guards to participate in interrogations.
The Taguba report and others by human rights groups reveal that the
detention system Mr. Rumsfeld oversees has become so grossly distorted
that military police have abused or tortured prisoners under the
direction of civilian contractors and intelligence officers outside
the military chain of command -- not in "exceptional" cases, as Mr.
Rumsfeld said Tuesday, but systematically. Army guards have held
"ghost" prisoners detained by the CIA and even hidden these prisoners
from the International Red Cross. Meanwhile, Mr. Rumsfeld's contempt
for the Geneva Conventions has trickled down: The Taguba report says
that guards at Abu Ghraib had not been instructed on them and that no
copies were posted in the facility.
The abuses that have done so much harm to the U.S. mission in Iraq
might have been prevented had Mr. Rumsfeld been responsive to earlier
reports of violations. Instead, he publicly dismissed or minimized
such accounts. He and his staff ignored detailed reports by respected
human rights groups about criminal activity at U.S.-run prisons in
Afghanistan, and they refused to provide access to facilities or
respond to most questions. In December 2002, two Afghan detainees died
in events that were ruled homicides by medical officials; only when
the New York Times obtained the story did the Pentagon confirm that an
investigation was underway, and no results have yet been announced.
Not until other media obtained the photos from Abu Ghraib did Mr.
Rumsfeld fully acknowledge what had happened, and not until Tuesday
did his department disclose that 25 prisoners have died in U.S.
custody in Iraq and Afghanistan. Accountability for those deaths has
been virtually nonexistent: One soldier was punished with a
dishonorable discharge.
On Monday Mr. Rumsfeld's spokesman said that the secretary had not
read Mr. Taguba's report, which was completed in early March.
Yesterday Mr. Rumsfeld told a television interviewer that he still
hadn't finished reading it, and he repeated his view that the Geneva
Conventions "did not precisely apply" but were only "basic rules" for
handling prisoners. His message remains the same: that the United
States need not be bound by international law and that the crimes Mr.
Taguba reported are not, for him, a priority. That attitude has
undermined the American military's observance of basic human rights
and damaged this country's ability to prevail in the war on terrorism.
© 2004 The Washington Post Company
.
|
