From a Washington Post editorial, 12/23/04:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A20986-2004Dec22.html
War Crimes
Thursday, December 23, 2004; Page A22
THANKS TO a lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union and other
human rights groups, thousands of pages of government documents
released this month have confirmed some of the painful truths about
the abuse of foreign detainees by the U.S. military and the CIA --
truths the Bush administration implacably has refused to acknowledge.
Since the publication of photographs of abuse at Iraq's Abu Ghraib
prison in the spring the administration's whitewashers -- led by
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld -- have contended that the crimes
were carried out by a few low-ranking reservists, that they were
limited to the night shift during a few chaotic months at Abu Ghraib
in 2003, that they were unrelated to the interrogation of prisoners
and that no torture occurred at the Guantanamo Bay prison where
hundreds of terrorism suspects are held.
The new documents establish beyond any doubt that every part of this
cover story is false.
Though they represent only part of the record that lies in government
files, the documents show that the abuse of prisoners was already
occurring at Guantanamo in 2002 and continued in Iraq even after the
outcry over the Abu Ghraib photographs.
FBI agents reported in internal e-mails and memos about systematic
abuses by military interrogators at the base in Cuba, including
beatings, chokings, prolonged sleep deprivation and humiliations such
as being wrapped in an Israeli flag.
"On a couple of occasions I entered interview rooms to find a detainee
chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair,
food or water," an unidentified FBI agent wrote on Aug. 2, 2004.
"Most times they had urinated or defecated on themselves, and had been
left there for 18 to 24 hours or more."
Two defense intelligence officials reported seeing prisoners severely
beaten in Baghdad by members of a special operations unit, Task Force
6-26, in June.
When they protested they were threatened and pictures they took were
confiscated.
Other documents detail abuses by Marines in Iraq, including mock
executions and the torture of detainees by burning and electric shock.
Several dozen detainees have died in U.S. custody.
In many cases, Army investigations of these crimes were shockingly
shoddy:
Officials lost records, failed to conduct autopsies after suspicious
deaths and allowed evidence to be contaminated.
Soldiers found to have committed war crimes were excused with
noncriminal punishments.
The summary of one suspicious death of a detainee at the Abu Ghraib
prison reads:
"No crime scene exam was conducted, no autopsy conducted, no copy of
medical file obtained for investigation because copy machine broken in
medical office."
Some of the abuses can be attributed to lack of discipline in some
military units -- though the broad extent of the problem suggests, at
best, that senior commanders made little effort to prevent or control
wrongdoing.
But the documents also confirm that interrogators at Guantanamo
believed they were following orders from Mr. Rumsfeld.
One FBI agent reported on May 10 about a conversation he had with
Guantanamo's commander, Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller, who defended the
use of interrogation techniques the FBI regarded as illegal on the
grounds that the military "has their marching orders from the Sec
Def."
Gen. Miller has testified under oath that dogs were never used to
intimidate prisoners at Guantanamo, as authorized by Mr. Rumsfeld in
December 2002; the FBI papers show otherwise.
The Bush administration refused to release these records to the human
rights groups under the Freedom of Information Act until it was
ordered to do so by a judge.
Now it has responded to their publication with bland promises by
spokesmen that any wrongdoing will be investigated.
The record of the past few months suggests that the administration
will neither hold any senior official accountable nor change the
policies that have produced this shameful record.
Congress, too, has abdicated its responsibility under its Republican
leadership:
It has been nearly four months since the last hearing on prisoner
abuse.
Perhaps intervention by the courts will eventually stem the violations
of human rights that appear to be ongoing in Guantanamo, Iraq and
Afghanistan.
For now the appalling truth is that there has been no remedy for the
documented torture and killing of foreign prisoners by this American
government.
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Things are getting interesting.
Harry
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