Despite President Bush's declaration that the U.S. "does not torture," the Senate Armed Services Committee has produced evidence that it was the policy of the U.S. government after 9/11 to use almost any aggressive technique, including beatings, electrical shocks, sexual humiliation, waterboarding, starvation, tying detainees, enforced nudity for weeks, and repeated kicks in the groin by female interrogators. A lawyer for the CIA's Counterterrorist Center, Jonathan Fredman, told the committee that the only limit to the aggressive techniques was "if the detainee dies, you're doing it wrong."
Thousands were falsely imprisoned, without any evidence of their guilt, and many of them were tortured and abused. At least 25 detainees were murdered out of a total of 100 detainee deaths, according to Larry Wilkerson, Colin Powell's former Chief of Staff.
U.S. Army General Antonia Taguba, who led the investigation into prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib, has accused the Bush administration of committing "war crimes" and called for those responsible to be held account, according to the McClatchy Washington Bureau.
"After years of disclosures by government investigations, media accounts and reports from human rights organizations, there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes," Taguba wrote. "The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account."
Many former detainees eventually released as innocent still suffer from trauma, the Associated Press reports on a study by Physicians for Human Rights. Further, "military lawyers warned the Pentagon that some of the methods it used to interrogate and hold detainees after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks violated military, U.S. and international law. Those objections were overruled by the top Pentagon lawyer, who said he was unaware of the criticism."
(Download the full report from Physicians for Human Rights)
Meanwhile, an eight-month McClatchy Newspapers investigation in 11 countries on three continents has found that hundreds of men have been wrongfully imprisoned by the U.S. in "Afghanistan, Cuba and elsewhere on the basis of flimsy or fabricated evidence, old personal scores or bounty payments."
Andrew Sullivan: "Defending suspected terrorists' human rights isn't popular - especially when those suspects are foreign, have brown skin and speak a different language. But if most Americans fully understood how many innocents have been swept into the Bush gulag, they might be more circumspect."
Perhaps the most damning and thorough account so far comes from a book by Philippe Sands, a professor of law at University College London. The book is called Torture Team: Rumsfeld's Memo and the Betrayal of American Values. He summarizes some of it in "It was Top Down Stupid: The Bush Administration's 'Bad Apples' Theory Goes Sour," an article for Slate. A description of the book at Amazon.com hits quite a few nails on the head:
On December 2, 2002 the U.S. Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, signed his name at the bottom of a document that listed eighteen techniques of interrogation--techniques that defied international definitions of torture. The Rumsfeld Memo authorized the controversial interrogation practices that later migrated to Guantanamo, Afghanistan, Abu Ghraib and elsewhere, as part of the policy of extraordinary rendition. From a behind-the-scenes vantage point, Phillipe Sands investigates how the Rumsfeld Memo set the stage for a divergence from the Geneva Convention and the Torture Convention and holds the individual gatekeepers in the Bush administration accountable for their failure to safeguard international law.
The Torture Team delves deep into the Bush administration to reveal:
· How the policy of abuse originated with Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and George W. Bush, and was promoted by their most senior lawyers· Personal accounts, through interview, of those most closely involved in the decisions· How the Joint Chiefs and normal military decision-making processes were circumvented· How Fox TV’s 24 contributed to torture planning· How interrogation techniques were approved for use· How the new techniques were used on Mohammed Al Qahtani, alleged to be “the 20th highjacker” (but the Pentagon in May 2008 dropped all charges against him)· How the senior lawyers who crafted the policy of abuse exposed themselves to the risk of war crimes charges
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