Rohan Pearce
The New York-based Human Rights Watch has called for the US government to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the role US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld and former CIA head George Tenet played in the torture of detainees carried out in Iraqi prisons, US-run facilities in Afghanistan, the US naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and at a range of secret locations around the world.
Commenting on the launch of the report that contains the call, Reed Brody, special counsel for HRW, explained that the "soldiers at the bottom of the chain are taking the heat for Abu Ghraib and torture around the world, while the guys at the top who made the policies are going scot free".
The report argues that Rumsfeld "created the conditions for U.S. troops to commit war crimes and torture by sidelining and disparaging the Geneva Conventions, by approving interrogation techniques that violated the Geneva Conventions as well as the Convention against Torture, and by approving the hiding of detainees from the International Committee of the Red Cross."
It continues: "From the earliest days of the war in Afghanistan, Secretary Rumsfeld was on notice through briefings, ICRC reports, human rights reports, and press accounts that US troops were committing war crimes, including acts of torture. However, there is no evidence that he ever exerted his authority and warned that the mistreatment of prisoners must stop. Had he done so, many of the crimes committed by U.S. forces could have been avoided."
In addition to looking into the above, the proposed investigation would determine if the illegal "interrogation techniques" that Rumsfeld authorised for Guantanamo prisoners "were actually used to inflict inhuman treatment on detainees there before he rescinded his approval to use them without requesting his permission"; and if Rumsfeld approved a secret program of physical and sexual torture of Iraqi prisoners, as alleged by the investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, who exposed the Abu Ghraib scandal.
The report accuses Tenet, CIA director from July 1997 until July 2004, of specifically authorising "waterboarding" (strapping a person down then pushing him or her under water until he or she thinks he or she is about to drown) and withholding medicine (one alleged member of Al Qaeda shot during his capture in Pakistan in 2002 had painkillers withheld during interrogation).
The report also claims the CIA is guilty of feigning suffocation, "stress positions", light and noise bombardment, sleep deprivation and making prisoners think they were being held by governments known to frequently employ torture. During Tenet's reign the CIA became notorious for its "rendering" of prisoners to governments that employed torture and for "disappearing" prisoners, holding them incommunicado at secret bases around the world.
HRW claims that there is enough evidence to investigate Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, formerly the top US commander in Iraq, and General Geoffrey Miller. Miller ran the Guantanamo Bay prison camp from November 2002 and, according to testimony by Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, was responsible for the decision to "GITMO-ise" the notorious Abu Ghraib prison (GITMO is the abbreviation for the Guantanamo Bay base used by the US military) after he was set to Iraq in August 2003 — applying many of the humiliating and vicious forms of torture used at the naval base to Abu Ghraib inmates. Documents released by the American Civil Liberties Union in March revealed that Karpinski had testified to military investigators that Miller advised her to treat prisoners "like dogs".
HRW accuses Washington of having "deliberately shielded the architects of illegal detention policies through the refusal to allow an independent inquiry of prisoner abuse and the failure to undertake criminal investigations against those leaders who allowed the widespread criminal abuse of detainees to develop and persist". The Pentagon has "established a plethora of investigations, all but one in-house, looking down the chain of command. Prosecutions have commenced only against low-level soldiers and contractors."
The group claims a special prosecutor is necessary because of the central involvement of US Attorney-General Alberto Gonzales in devising pseudo-legal mechanisms to justify the Bush administration's torture policy. During the hearings over his confirmation as attorney-general in January, Gonzales claimed that the prohibition on cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment doesn't apply to US treatment of non-US citizens overseas.
In 2002, acting as counsel for the White House, he penned a memo that argued that the so-called war on terror "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" and that this "renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions". An added benefit, Gonzales wrote, was that not defining Taliban and Al Qaeda members as prisoners of war under the Geneva Conventions "substantially reduces the threat of domestic criminal prosecution [of US officials] under the [US] War Crimes Act".
Ironically, the HRW report comes at a time when the US is considering formalising its "right" to torture. The Pentagon is considering regulations that would entrench the US military's stripping of human rights from "war on terror" prisoners by defining them as "enemy combatants", and allow them to be detained without access to the International Red Cross.
From Green Left Weekly, May 4, 2005.
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