SubscribeWhile the proverbial road to hell is paved with good intentions, the internal government memos collected in this publication demonstrate that the path to the purgatory that is Guantanamo Bay, or Abu Ghraib, has been paved with decidedly bad intentions. The policies that resulted in rampant abuse of detainees first in Afghanistan, then at Guantanamo Bay, and later in Iraq, were product of three pernicious purposes designed to facilitate the unilateral and unfettered detention, interrogation, abuse, judgment, and punishment of prisoners: (1) the desire to place the detainees beyond the reach of any court or law; (2) the desire to abrogate the Geneva Convention with respect to the treatment of persons seized in the context of armed hostilities; and (3) the desire to absolve those implementing the policies of any liability for war crimes under U.S. and international law.Regarding the Torture Papers, which detail Torture's Paper Trail, and, then there's Hungry for Air: Learning The Language Of Torture, and, of course, there's ( more inside)
"You know the North Vietnamese made the same determination about American prisoners?" McCain, a Republican from Arizona, asked.
"Yes, sir," replied Vice Admiral Albert Church.
Church appeared before the Senate Armed Services Committee on Thursday to present his findings from a lengthy investigation into how the administration had developed and used its prisoner interrogation policies.
The release of the investigation’s findings coincides with the disclosure today of 800 additional pages of military documents obtained by the ACLU in its Freedom of Information Act lawsuit seeking information on torture by United States military personnel overseas. The new documents reveal:From ACLU Says New Detainee Report Does Not Absolve Senior Officials of Responsibility for Abuses
A formal agreement between the CIA and Pentagon on how to hide "ghost detainees" from Red Cross officials, which is a significant violation of international law. Several documents refer to ghost detainees who died in custody, including one whose body was taken away by a taxi driver paid by interrogators.
A culture of "releaseophobia" among military personnel charged with administering detentions in Iraq, which left many innocent men and women languishing in prison.
A sworn statement by a military intelligence official that the vast majority of detainees in Iraq were "peripheral bystanders" and that "perhaps only one in ten security detainees were of any particular intelligence value."
Question: What are we looking at when we see, for example, the instances at Abu Ghraib; when we look at the information about the ghost detainees and the allegations of all the prisoners abuses at Guantanamo, sentences, laws, a number of prisoners held in Afghanistan, as well as Iraq, that I know about? Are we looking at ad hoc lawlessness? Is this a window into just an aberration, or do we now, as journalists, make the link that what we're seeing is a pervasive new atmosphere the military, that it is entitled to put aside the Geneva Convention and the ways must be found around them, and that the most important priority is to find the information at all costs? Are we looking at a new climate or a new culture throughout the military?Experts Respond to Bush Administration's Legal Angling on Torture
Rear Admiral John Hutson, U.S. Navy (Ret.), former naval judge advocate general: Well, I certainly hope that we are not, and what we're looking at is a complete aberration. Because if we fall down to that depth, if we go so far from the moral high ground that this becomes acceptable and the standard operating procedure, than we really will have lost the war on terrorism, no matter what happens in body count, we will have lost the war. So, I certainly hope that's not the case. I think that it does require however – this gets back to something we mentioned very early in the conversation about an investigation of some sort, and there are various ways of doing that – but I think that it is absolutely incumbent upon, not the military per se, but the U.S. to investigate this in a manner in which both domestically and internationally, we can be comfortable that one, we have found all the bad stuff there is to find. We have finally got to ground zero. Two, we are able to make the corrections that need to be made, in order to ensure this doesn't happens again. Because if we don't do that, it surely will. Perhaps not in this context, maybe not in a prison, but that that kind of lawlessness – that kind of willingness to throw off the rules because we're in a war against terror – will surely bring us down.
This is the kind of war we will have in the future. This is the new face of the war. War used to be linear. It had a beginning, middle, and an end. It was against a nation state, we all wore uniforms, and somebody was there who could actually surrender. But now, for the foreseeable future in our lifetime, this is the kind of stakes we're going to be facing and we have to learn how to deal with it. Simply becoming terrorists ourselves is not the answer.
Who was responsible? There are various levels of accountability. But it seems unmistakable from these documents that decisions made by the president himself and the secretary of defense contributed to confusion, vagueness and disarray, which, in turn, led directly to abuse and torture. The president bears sole responsibility for ignoring Colin Powell's noble warnings. The esoteric differences between legal 'abuse' and illegal 'torture' and the distinction between 'prisoners of war' and 'unlawful combatants' were and are so vague as to make the abuse of innocents almost inevitable. Justice Sandra Day O'Connor wrote for the majority of the Supreme Court in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld that 'the government has never provided any court with the full criteria that it uses in classifying individuals' as enemy combatants. It is one thing to make a distinction in theory between Geneva-protected combatants and unprotected Qaeda operatives. But in the chaos of a situation like Iraq, how can you practically know the difference? When one group is designated as unworthy of humane treatment, and that group is impossible to distinguish from others, it is unsurprising that exceptions quickly become rules. The best you can say is that in an administration with a reputation for clear lines of command and clear rules of engagement, the vagueness and incompetence are the most striking features.Atrocities in Plain Sight
Worse, the president has never acknowledged the scope or the real gravity of what has taken place. His first instinct was to minimize the issue; later, his main references to it were a couple of sentences claiming that the abuses were the work of a handful of miscreants, rather than a consequence of his own decisions. But the impact of these events on domestic morale, on the morale of the vast majority of honorable soldiers in a very tough place and on the reputation of the United States in the Middle East is incalculable. The war on terror is both military and political. The president's great contribution has been to recognize that a solution is impossible without political reform in the Middle East. And yet the prevalence of brutality and inhumanity among American interrogators has robbed the United States of the high ground it desperately needs to maintain in order to win. What better weapon for Al Qaeda than the news that an inmate at Guantánamo was wrapped in the Israeli flag or that prisoners at Abu Ghraib were raped? There is no escaping the fact that, whether he intended to or not, this president handed Al Qaeda that weapon. Sometimes a brazen declaration of toughness is actually a form of weakness. In a propaganda war for the hearts and minds of Muslims everywhere, it's simply self-defeating.
And the damage done was intensified by President Bush's refusal to discipline those who helped make this happen. A president who truly recognized the moral and strategic calamity of this failure would have fired everyone responsible. But the vice president's response to criticism of the defense secretary in the wake of Abu Ghraib was to say, 'Get off his back.' In fact, those with real responsibility for the disaster were rewarded. Rumsfeld was kept on for the second term, while the man who warned against ignoring the Geneva Conventions, Colin Powell, was seemingly nudged out. The man who wrote a legal opinion maximizing the kind of brutal treatment that the United States could legally defend, Jay S. Bybee, was subsequently rewarded with a nomination to a federal Court of Appeals. General Sanchez and Gen. John P. Abizaid remain in their posts. Alberto R. Gonzales, who wrote memos that validated the decision to grant Geneva status to inmates solely at the president's discretion, is now nominated to the highest law enforcement job in the country: attorney general. The man who paved the way for the torture of prisoners is to be entrusted with safeguarding the civil rights of Americans. It is astonishing he has been nominated, and even more astonishing that he will almost certainly be confirmed.
Here is Unusual Suspects : What happened to the women held at Abu Ghraib?
From Human Rights Watch comes U.S. Strips Detainees of Key Protections - Diplomatic Convention Undermined
September 20, 2004 - A Torture Killing by U.S. Forces in Afghanistan
March 13, 2005 - Army Details Scale of Abuse of Prisoners in an Afghan Jail
The brutal truth - The outrages of Abu Ghraib are no accident, says Stephen Sedley
Originally from the New York Times: Gonzales and the Torture Question (9 Letters)
Ritual Abuse
The Mens Rea Requirement of Command Responsibility:
Modern Developments and Future Direction
Here is Mark Danner's We Are All Torturers Now, concerning the confirmation hearings for Albert Gonzales nomination for Attorney General, and the related Torture and Gonzales:An Exchange.
posted by y2karl at 9:55 AM on March 14, 2005