General claims Bush gave 'marching orders' on aggressive interrogation at Guantanamo
A new book written by two American Civil Liberties Union attorneys claims that President Bush gave "marching orders" to Gen. Michael Dunlavey, who asked the Pentagon to approve harsher interrogation methods at Guantanamo Bay.
The books claims are based on documents obtained as a result of ongoing legal fights over a Freedom of Information Act request filed in October 2003 by the ACLU and other human rights and anti-war groups.
"[T]he documents show unambiguously that the administration has adopted some of the methods of the most tyrannical regimes," write Jameel Jaffer and Amrit Singh. "Documents from Guantanamo describe prisoners shackled in excruciating 'stress positions,' held in freezing-cold cells, forcibly stripped, hooded, terrorized with military dogs, and deprived of human contact for months."The real scandal surrounding American abuse of detainees is that there are very few of us who think that Bush and Rumsfeld and others will ever be held accountable for what they have done.
The documents show that prisoner abuse like that found at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq was hardly the isolated incident that the Bush administration or US military claimed it was. By the time the prisoner abuse story broke in mid-2004 the Army knew of at least 62 other allegations of abuse at different prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan, the authors report.
Drawing almost exclusively from the documents, the authors say there is a stark contrast between the public statements of President Bush and then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and the policies those and others in the administration were advocating behind the scenes.
President Bush gave "marching orders" to Gen. Michael Dunlavey, who asked the Pentagon to approve harsher interrogation methods at Guantanamo, the general claims in documents reported in the book.
The ACLU also found that an Army investigator reported Rumsfeld was "personally involved" in overseeing the interrogation of a Guantanamo prisoner Mohammed al Qahtani. The prisoner was forced to parade naked in front of female interrogators wearing women's underwear on his head and was led around on a leash while being forced to perform dog tricks.
“It is imperative that senior officials who authorized, endorsed, or tolerated the abuse and torture of prisoners be held accountable," Jaffer and Singh write, "not only as a matter of elemental justice, but to ensure that the same crimes are not perpetrated again.”
Indeed, even if were to be proved that Bush had personally called for prisoners to be mistreated there would be a cacophony of right wing pundits who would race to defend his actions and claim that in the "war on terror" there are many of us who would attack the president for making prisoners "uncomfortable".
The unspoken truth behind many on the rights defence of the Bush regimes stance when it comes to accusations of torture is that they, deep down, agree that torture is justified. They just can't bring themselves to make the argument, which is why they end up using euphemisms like "uncomfortable" when what we are actually talking about is waterboarding.
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2 comments:
Sadly, it's true that BushCo will never be held accountable for their crimes, even against American citizens. I'm afraid that if anything is to be done about Dubya and his ilk, it will have to come from somewhere in the World Body, and I'm not sure there's the will for that to happen either.
The truth, sadly, is that only the rulers of small country's ever end up before any world court and that Bush and Blair committed their war crimes knowing that they will never be held to account for them. It's a scandal, but it's simply a fact.
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