RUMSFELD: There's two aspects to the facility there at Abu Ghraib. One aspect, of course, is detention. It's keeping people off the street so that they can't go out and commit a criminal act.
A second aspect is interrogation, and it's asking people questions to try to glean information that can save the lives of American soldiers in Iraq. And one aspect of it is handled by the people who handle detention and another aspect is handled by the people who handle the process of asking questions to try to save the lives of American soldiers.
LAUER: But can the people who handled the asking questions aspect of it really tell a brigadier general that she cannot have any access to that cell block?
RUMSFELD: Those are legal questions that are being studied in the investigation and determined to try to assess responsibility and culpability.
LAUER: Let me read you something from the Washington Post in their editorial this morning. It says, quote, "A pattern of arrogant disregard for the protections of the Geneva Conventions or any other legal procedure has been set from the top by Mr. Rumsfeld and senior U.S. commanders." What's your response to that?
RUMSFELD: Well, it's not accurate. The fact of the matter is that from the very outset, the decision was made by the government of the United States that the people detained would not be treated in a manner that was - (correction?). The decision was made that the Geneva Convention did not apply precisely but that every individual would be treated as though the Geneva Convention did apply. And as a result, the provisions of the Geneva Convention were the basic rules under which all people were detained. So it would not be accurate to say what that editorial said.
And this from yesterday's hearings:
RUMSFELD: Well, the -- as the chief of staff of the Army can tell you, the guards are trained to guard people. They're not trained to interrogate, they're not -- and their instructions are to, in the case of Iraq, adhere to the Geneva Convention.
The Geneva Conventions apply to all of the individuals there in one way or another. They apply to the prisoners of war, and they are written out and they're instructed and the people in the Army train them to that and the people in the Central Command have the responsibility of seeing that, in fact, their conduct is consistent with the Geneva Conventions.
The criminals in the same detention facility are handled under a different provision of the Geneva Convention -- I believe it's the fourth and the prior one's the third.
MCCAIN: So the guards were instructed to treat the prisoners, under some kind of changing authority as I understand it, according to the Geneva Conventions?
RUMSFELD: Absolutely.
So which is it? Did the Geneva Convention apply or not? Was it "absolutely" in effect, or were prisoners to be treated "as though" it were in effect? Did Rumsfeld discover only the night before the hearings that the GC applied in Iraq, just as he for the first time saw the pictures?
Perhaps I'm drawing too fine a line here, but I believe the difference is critical. If the message from the top in Iraq was that the Geneva Convention did not strictly apply, the MP and MI officials were given an opening for the abuse and torture that did indeed occur.
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