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www.adamhodges.com

Wednesday, December 08, 2004

Systemic Torture Covered Up

As Rumsfeld signs on for another four years, the Bush administration and its Secretary of Defense have yet to be held accountable for the systemic torture implicitly condoned and encouraged under their watch.

In a press release from the American Civil Liberties Union (7 Dec 2004), ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero commented on recently obtained documents in a Freedom of Information Act request:

"The more the government is forced to reveal, the more we learn that individuals in U.S. custody, many of whom have not been accused of wrongdoing, were tortured and abused. These documents tell a damning story of sanctioned government abuse -- a story that the government has tried to hide and may well come back to haunt our own troops captured in Iraq."

When will Donald Rumsfeld and George W. Bush be held accountable for their egregious violations of domestic and international law? The world cannot wait another four years.

- Adam

US forces 'hid Iraq prison abuse' (BBC, 8 Dec 2004)

According to the memos, detainees held in Iraq often arrived at prisons, including Baghdad's Abu Ghraib jail, which was at the centre of allegations of systematic prisoner abuse, bearing "burn marks" on their backs.

The documents also shed light on a tense relationship between the US military hierarchy in Iraq and intelligence agents posted to the region. Several documents detail specific concerns about the conduct of military personnel in Iraq.

One memo, from Vice Admiral Lowell E Jacoby, head of the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA), describes how staff who complained about abuse were threatened, had their car keys confiscated and e-mails monitored, as well as being ordered not to leave the base or speak to friends or relatives in the US.

Another details an incident in which a prisoner was punched in the face by military personnel "to the point he needed medical attention".

Task force staff did not record the medical treatment and confiscated DIA photographs of the injuries, the memo says.

Both documents were dated 25 June 2004.

full article

Torturing the law, if not prisoners (Financial Times, 8 Dec 2004)

When an internal US memo, citing International Red Cross Committee allegations that US treatment of prisoners at Guantánamo had been tantamount to torture, was leaked last week to the press, many supporters of the Bush administration chose to flay the foreign messenger, rather than address the message itself. But they cannot dodge the issue now that the same allegations of prisoner abuse have also come from a senior FBI agent.

[...]

The torture issue is clear. The practice is outlawed under the Geneva convention on the treatment of prisoners, and where the Geneva convention does not apply - or where in the case of Guantánamo the US has chosen not to apply it - the practice is equally illegal under the international convention against torture. So the US is no better off for deciding to operate outside the Geneva convention, which it did in the apparent belief that this would give it the ability to deal with al-Qaeda and Taliban suspects as freely and for as long as it wanted to.

[...]

In the meantime, the Bush administration is discrediting its proclaimed campaign to spread democracy and human rights around the world. It is hard to imagine anything more counter-productive to this goal than its continuing mistreatment, by legal if not physical means, of the Guantánamo detainees.

full article

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