Report Blames Top US Officials for Alleged Torture of Detainees

It would appear that those of us who have been arguing that torture in the US system is so widespread that it appears to be officially sanctioned by the government have found ourselves a new ally. Amnesty International have produced a 32,000 page report which makes those very allegations:

"Although the U.S. government continues to assert its condemnation of torture and ill-treatment, these statements contradict what is happening in practice," said Curt Goering, the group's senior deputy executive director in the United States. "The U.S. government is not only failing to take steps to eradicate torture, it is actually creating a climate in which torture and other ill-treatment can flourish."

The report notes that American military officials have listed 34 deaths of detainees in U.S. custody as "confirmed or suspected criminal homicides." It suggested that the true number may be much higher, saying "there is evidence that delays, cover-ups and deficiencies in investigations have hampered the collection of evidence."

"In several cases," it says, "substantial evidence has emerged that detainees were tortured to death while under interrogation. . . . What is even more disturbing is that standard practices as well as interrogation techniques believed to have fallen within officially sanctioned parameters, appear to have played a role in the ill-treatment."

The Amnesty International report was a foretaste of the hearing in Geneva, scheduled for Friday and Monday.

As I argued here, the US case has never made any sense.

"Why would the US have any need to fly suspected persons in special rendition flights to country's that are known to implement the torture of prisoners, if the US does not condone torture?

Why does Vice President Dick Cheney refuse to outlaw US interrogators engaging in "cruel, inhuman and degrading" treatment of prisoners if he does not intend that they engage in those very acts?

Why would White House counsel Alberto R. Gonzales remove the protection of the Geneva Conventions from prisoners and write a memo stating that "acts inflicting, and specifically intended to inflict, severe pain or suffering, mental or physical, must be of an extreme nature to rise to the level of torture": if not to justify acts that the rest of the sane world would most certainly conclude were acts of torture?

When the US reports to the UN that acts of torture have taken place in US detention centres in Guantanamo Bay, as well as in Afghanistan and Iraq, one has to ask how such an aberration could take place simultaneously in so many US detention centres, in so many different parts of the world, without this being officially sanctioned policy."

The executive rarely demand an inherent power unless this is a power that it is planning on utilising.

It is time to stop pretending that we believe in the "few bad apples" defence that the US has up until now relied upon. It appears apparent that this system of brutal interrogation was conceived and condoned at the very highest levels of the Bush administration.

34 people don't die in your custody unless you are beating them.

It's high time Rumsfeld and Cheney answered for these crimes rather than the underlings that are merely following their orders.

Tags: Amnesty, International, report, torture, US, war, crimes, Rumsfeld, Cheney,