[North-NV-Greens] Fwd: War Crimes

Sat Dec 25 23:29:22 PST 2004

>
>
>    Washington Post
>    December 23, 2004
>   
>    The Washington Post | Editorial
>
>    War Crimes
>
>    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 Guant·namo 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
>    Guant·namo in 2002 and continued in Iraq even after
>    the outcry over the Abu Ghraib photographs. F.B.I.
>    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 F.B.I. 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 Guant·namo believed they were
>    following orders from Mr. Rumsfeld. One F.B.I.
>    agent reported on May 10 about a conversation he
>    had with Guant·namo's commander, Maj. Gen. Geoffrey
>    D. Miller, who defended the use of interrogation
>    techniques the F.B.I. 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 Guant·namo, as authorized by Mr.
>    Rumsfeld in December 2002; the F.B.I. 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 Guant·namo, 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.
>   
>    http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A20986-2004Dec22.html
>
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-- 
Paul Etxeberri

"Forests precede civilizations and deserts follow"   ---Chateaubriand