WP: The Truth About Abu Ghraib
FOR 15 MONTHS now the Bush administration has insisted that the horrific photographs of abuse from the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq were the result of freelance behavior by low-level personnel and had nothing to do with its policies. In this the White House has been enthusiastically supported by the Army brass, which has conducted investigations documenting hundreds of cases of prisoner mistreatment in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, but denies that any of its senior officers are culpable. For some time these implacable positions have been glaringly at odds with the known facts. In the past few days, those facts have grown harder to ignore.
More below
In statements to investigators and in sworn testimony to Congress last year, Gen. Miller denied that he recommended the use of dogs for interrogation, or that they had been used at Guantanamo. "No methods contrary to the Geneva Convention were presented at any time by the assistance team that I took to [Iraq]," he said under oath on May 19, 2004.
....
The court evidence strongly suggests that Gen. Miller lied about his actions, and it merits further investigation by prosecutors and Congress. But the Guantanamo commander was not acting on his own: The interrogation of Mr. Qahtani, investigators found, was carried out under rules approved by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld on Dec. 2, 2002. After strong protests from military lawyers, the Rumsfeld standards -- which explicitly allowed nudity, the use of dogs and shackling -- were revised in April 2003. Yet the same practices were later adopted at Abu Ghraib, at least in part at the direct instigation of Gen. Miller. "We understood," Maj. DiNenna testified, "that [Gen. Miller] was sent over by the secretary of defense."
....
The White House and Pentagon have gotten away with their stonewalling largely because of Republican control of Congress. When the Abu Ghraib scandal erupted, GOP leaders such as Sen. John W. Warner (Va.) loudly vowed to get to the bottom of the matter -- but once the bottom started to come into view late last year, Mr. Warner's demands for accountability ceased.
And this from Newsweek
There is also evidence of a possible Pentagon cover-up. According to Taguba's report, which was first revealed in The New Yorker, a previous Army investigator, Maj. Gen. Donald Ryder, somehow failed to note last fall that MPs were being asked to facilitate interrogation. In addition, a mounting body of other evidence around the world suggests that abuses did not stop there or even in Iraq, that the Geneva Conventions protecting prisoners of war from beatings and humiliation were being routinely flouted in an environment where, as at Gitmo and Abu Ghraib, almost anything can happen because almost no one is held accountable. In Afghanistan, the abuse of prisoners seems to have led to at least three deaths at U.S. interrogation facilities. According to U.S. military pathologists, two Afghan detainees died of "blunt force injuries" to "the lower extremities" and "legs" at Baghram in December 2002 and another Afghan prisoner died at a U.S. military camp in Kunar province in June 2003. Yet 18 months after the first deaths, a military investigation is still incomplete, and no broad inquiry like the Taguba probe has been launched into conditions at Baghram, according to a military spokesman in Kabul.
.....
Many critics say the Bush administration routinely uses the global war on terrorism as a blanket justification for all sorts of human-rights violations. "The United States is running a gulag, a series of detention centers around the world where international legal standards are not having sway," says Carroll Bogert of Human Rights Watch. "They opened the door to a little bit of torture, and a whole lot of torture walked through." Nigel Rodley, who was the U.N. special rapporteur on torture and has written an authoritative book, "The Treatment of Prisoners Under International Law," dismisses Rumsfeld's claims that the Geneva Conventions have been observed. Rodley says that even some interrogation practices the Pentagon acknowledges using are "clearly violations both of international human-rights law and international humanitarian law as codified in the Geneva Conventions." He adds that the problem "goes back to the whole process of essentially creating legal black holes where people are held in the dark and secret reaches of state power. When that happens it breeds a sense of impunity and people do things that they shouldn't do."
One American intelligence officer admitted as much, telling NEWSWEEK: "The U.S. government and military capitalizes on the dubious status [as sovereign states] of Afghanistan, Diego Garcia, Guantanamo Bay, Iraq and aircraft carriers, to avoid certain legal questions about rough interrogations. Whatever humanitarian pronouncements a state such as ours may make about torture, states don't perform interrogations, individual people do. What's going to stop an impatient soldier, in a supralegal location, from whacking one nameless, dehumanized shopkeeper among many?"