The
the documents the ACLU recently released have demonstrated a stunning level of hypocrisy and cynicism on the part of the Bush administration. When the Abu Ghirab scandal broke, the administration claimed that it was an isolated incident, limited to the conduct of "a few bad apples". The individuals involved were demonized by the administration and subjected to harsh courtmartials resulting in long prison sentences.
The ACLU documents demonstrate a different narrative than that provided by the administration, however. They clearly demonstrate, by eyewitness reports, that the abuse in the Iraq POW system was
far more widespread and
at times more severe than even that done in Abu Ghirab. The administration never mentioned the extend of this abuse and did it's best to ignore it, leaving it undealt with.
Above all, the administration has pretended that it has had no part in the development of this situation, though it laid the framework for it early on, provided for its early developments, and, if the ACLU documents prove to be true, may have in fact ordered the abuses at the very highest levels of Government.
The foundation for the abusive POW system was laid in the aftermath of September 11, when the President, Donald Rumsfeld, and John Ashcroft agreed to the establishment of a secret detention and interrogation system which would sidestep the Geneva Conventions. The system would operate in foreign countries and on overseas bases where questionable interrogation tactics would be less likely to be called into question. The administration sought to set down a "forward-leaning" legal framework which would allow US agents more legal safeguards in obtaining information from detainees.
In January 2002, the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel's John Yoo co-authored a 42 page memo saying that neither members of Al Queda nor the Taliban were to be considered lawful combatants. Thus, the war in Afghanastan was not subject to the Geneva Conventions. Justice Department lawyers than began developing very narrow definitions of what constituted torture, leaving huge swaths of options up to the judgment of the interrogation operatives and eventually untrained soldiers in Iraqi prisons.
The State Department and military lawyers "were horrified when they saw the memo, saying that the logic behind it was highly dubious.
Two days after the Yoo memo circulated, the State Department's chief legal adviser, William Howard Taft IV, fired a memo to Yoo calling his analysis "seriously flawed." State's most immediate concern was the unilateral conclusion that all captured Taliban were not covered by the Geneva Conventions. "In previous conflicts, the United States has dealt with tens of thousands of detainees without repudiating its obligations under the Conventions," Taft wrote. "I have no doubt we can do so here, where a relative handful of persons is involved."
Secretary of State Colin Powell requested that the President reconsider the decision to label the Taliban member's unlawful combatants. Bush, however, had already made up his mind. In response, he had White House legal counsel, Alberto Gonzales, draft the now notorious January 25 memo intended to rationalize and justify the conduct of US soldiers and CIA operatives in the future.
"As you have said, the war against terrorism is a new kind of war," Gonzales wrote to Bush. "The nature of the new war places a --high premium on other factors, such as the ability to quickly obtain information from captured terrorists and their sponsors in order to avoid further atrocities against American civilians." Gonzales concluded in stark terms: "In my judgment, this new paradigm renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions."
This memo makes explicit that the administration was not just trying to find a way around the laws provided in the Geneva Conventions, but that they, in fact, no longer desired to abide by it, and were actively working to subvert it.
In January, the first terror suspects were delivered to Guatanamo base, camp X-Ray, and, after the current base commander was deemed too lenient, was put under the command of military intelligence, under the leadership of Major General Geoffery Miller. Initially, the military, because it was subject to the Uniform Code of Military Justice, refused to participate in the techniques the CIA was involved in.
However, over time the CIA and military interrogators became more and more similar in their approaches. Civilian Pentagon leaders even attempted to encourage the interrogators to adopt more aggressive tactics, sending down an order toward the end of 2002 that reinterpreted the Geneva Conventions to allow for tougher interrogation techniques.
Guantanamo began to produce information, so much so that when in the summer of 2003 Rumsfeld, frustrated by the lack of actionable intelligence coming out of the POW system in Iraq, sent Miller to instruct the individuals conducting interrogation there. Upon arrival, Miller notified Janis Karpenski, the Commander of the 800 Military Police Brigade which was overseeing the prison system in Iraq, that Iraqi detention would from that time be dedicated to intelligence collection and that Abu Ghirab would be placed under the command of military intelligence.
The Gitmo techniques were then transferred to the Iraqi detention system along with some of the CIA interrogators who usefully demonstrated the some of the routes the MPs could take in their treatment of the detainees. The pictures we all saw on the TV screens in late May were the eventual result of all this.
The Bush administration argued that the Abu Ghurab scandal was an isolated incident and has prosecuted the soldiers involved to the fullest extent possible. However, the documents received by the ACLU suggest that the abusive tactics were much more widespread.
They detail how the interrogators in Iraq and Afganastan performed mock executions of detainees, burned their hands and genitalia, and pretended to attack them with prison dogs until they urinated. Prisoners have been summarily executed and raped. One soldier executed without warning a prisoner attempting to escape. The soldier in question received nothing like the years in prison the Abu Ghirab guards received, being reduced in rank and administratively discharged instead.
The administration has claimed no responsibility for the prisoner abuse tactics. However, the documents suggest that orders violating the Geneva Conventions came down from its very highest ranking members.
A January 21, 2004 email stated that "this technique [of impersonating FBI agents] and all those used in these scenarios [that is, the `torture techniques' referred to in the other email], was approved by the Dep Sec Def," referring to Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz. A Pentagon spokesman denied that Wolfowitz approved any techniques...
An FBI agent reported on May 10, 2004 that in a conversation with Miller, the general defended the Army's use of certain techniques not allowed by the FBI. The military "has their marching orders from the Sec Def," he declared, referring to Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld.
One email even suggests that the President possibly issued an executive order authorizing tactics outside the boundries of Geneva. The email explicitly mentions the said order ten times. The White House has denied its existence.
The email, which was obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union, represents the first hard evidence directly connecting the Abu Ghirab prison abuse scandal and the White House. The author of the email, whose name is blanked out but whose title is described as "On Scene Commander -- Baghdad," contains ten explicit mentions of an "Executive Order" that the author said mandated US military personnel to engage in extraordinary interrogation tactics...
"As stated, there was a revision last week in the military's standard operating procedures based on the Executive Order," the letter reads. "I have been told that all interrogation techniques previously authorized by the Executive Order are still on the table but that certain techniques can only be used if very high-level authority is granted." The author goes on to recount having seen a military email that said certain techniques -- including "stress positions," the use of dogs, "sleep management," hoods, "stripping (except for health inspection)," and blaring music -- cannot be used without special authorization.
All of this suggests a stunning level of hypocrisy, cynicism, and duplicity on the part of the administration, not to mention criminal subversion of US law under the 1996 War Crimes Act. The Bush administration has acted decisively to cover up the extent of the abuse being committed in Iraq.
It has fired token mid-level commanders and dealt with individuals who committed crimes even worse than those at Abu Ghurab in a hush-hush manner, doing little more than administratively discharging them. Since the new allegations have surfaced, the President has ignored them, allowing his press secretary to provide cookie-cutter answers to reporters and sending off his Defense Secretary to Iraq to patch things up with the troops.
As to the institutional oversight of our country, they are nowhere to be found. The GOP controlled Congress is sitting on its hands now months after the scandal broke, and the cable news networks have barely touched it in their continued race to the right.
Some of the saner voices in the media, however, are beginning to realize the magnitude of the situation the administration has created. This past week, no less a voice than the centrist Washington Post Editorial page, accused the administration of committing war crimes and covering them up. They write:
Since the publication of photographs of abuse at Iraq's Abu Ghirab 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 Ghirab 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.
Its clear that the Bush administration used the prosecutions of the Abu Ghirab prison guards in order to diffuse the domestic blowback from the scandal and to ignore how widespread the abuse they created was becoming. The memos the Justice Department and the White House legal team wrote in late 2001 and early 2002, were prepared specifically to shield individuals who participated in this kind of aggressive interrogation.
When Bush and Rumsfeld were expressing their disgust for the participants in the scandal they failed to mention that they had created the legal framework which left open enough undefined legal territory to allow these actions to occur, nor did they mention that they were not even certain that the detainees were lawful combatants and thus guaranteed human treatment. Rather, with a reelection campaign looming, they sold out the very perpetrators of the acts they encouraged.
This should not come as a surprise to anyone, however. It is standard fare for how this administration treats its military service members. They are not individuals with lives and families, but pawns on a chessboard with no other purpose than furthering their ideological agenda and consolidating their power. Virtually every decision they have made pertaining to our troops has demonstrated a clear contempt for their well-being, from sending them into Iraq ill-equipped and understaffed to failing to adequately plan for the combat zone they were being sent to to Donald Rumsfeld's bizarre indifference to the soldiers he leads. This is only the most recent example.
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