Top Bush aides pushed for Guantánamo torture
The Guardian are leading today with the story that General Richard Myers, chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff from 2001 to 2005, was "duped" by the Bush administration into believing that the Geneva Conventions were being applied in Guantanamo Bay and that prisoners in the Cuban base could not be subjected to torture.
Myers, it is claimed in a new book by Philippe Sands QC, believed that all interrogations at the camp were being carried out in accordance with the army's field manual and believes that he was a victim of "intrigue" by top lawyers at the department of justice, the office of vice-president Dick Cheney, and at Donald Rumsfeld's defence department.
The lawyers, all political appointees, who pushed through the interrogation techniques were Alberto Gonzales, David Addington and William Haynes. Also involved were Doug Feith, Rumsfeld's under-secretary for policy, and Jay Bybee and John Yoo, two assistant attorney generals.Again and again as this sorry tale unfolds the same names continually appear. Gonzales, Addington, Feith, Bybee and Yoo. Without these men none of this could have taken place as they are the men who continually told Bush and his administration that what they were doing was legal. Despite the fact that some of what they were doing is recognised as torture by every country that the US would consider an ally.
There are many of us who simply never bought the story that Abu Ghraib and other atrocities were the work of a few bad apples as the stories of abuse circulating from Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch all had the same techniques being replicated in different locations all over the world. It was very easy to work out that we were witnessing a pattern of abuse that must have been sanctioned very near the top of the political ladder.The revelations have sparked a fierce response in the US from those familiar with the contents of the book, and who are determined to establish accountability for the way the Bush administration violated international and domestic law by sanctioning prisoner abuse and torture.
The Bush administration has tried to explain away the ill-treatment of detainees at Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq by blaming junior officials. Sands' book establishes that pressure for aggressive and cruel treatment of detainees came from the top and was sanctioned by the most senior lawyers.
Myers was one top official who did not understand the implications of what was being done. Sands, who spent three hours with the former general, says he was "confused" about the decisions that were taken.
Myers mistakenly believed that new techniques recommended by Haynes and authorised by Rumsfeld in December 2002 for use by the military at Guantánamo had been taken from the US army field manual. They included hooding, sensory deprivation, and physical and mental abuse.
"As we worked through the list of techniques, Myers became increasingly hesitant and troubled," writes Sands. "Haynes and Rumsfeld had been able to run rings around him."
And, with Bush's recent admission that he sanctioned this behaviour, the story is finally going to come out.
And people like Myers appear to have been totally cut out of the loop by Rumsfeld and others. Indeed, there is some suggestion that Myers was chosen precisely because Rumsfeld could outsmart him.
Wilkerson makes one final chilling point:"We never authorised torture, we just didn't, not what we would do," Myers said. Sands comments: "He really had taken his eye off the ball ... he didn't ask too many questions ... and kept his distance from the decision-making process."
Larry Wilkerson, a former army officer and chief of staff to Colin Powell, US secretary of state at the time, told the Guardian: "I do know that Rumsfeld had neutralised the chairman [Myers] in many significant ways.
"The secretary did this by cutting [Myers] out of important communications, meetings, deliberations and plans.
"At the end of the day, however, Dick Myers was not a very powerful chairman in the first place, one reason Rumsfeld recommended him for the job".
"Haynes, Feith, Yoo, Bybee, Gonzalez and - at the apex - Addington, should never travel outside the US, except perhaps to Saudi Arabia and Israel. They broke the law; they violated their professional ethical code. In future, some government may build the case necessary to prosecute them in a foreign court, or in an international court."They are criminals who enabled torture. If they were ever to set foot in Britain I feel quite sure that Peter Thatchell would apply for them to be arrested and I am quite sure that a British court would grant a warrant for their arrest just as British courts approved the arrest of Pinochet.
I know that many right wing Americans treat international law as if it is something which they are entitled to take or leave as it suits their purposes, but the rest of the planet takes it a bit more seriously than they do. As Haynes, Feith, Yoo, Bybee, Gonzales and Addington would discover if they ever leave America's shores.
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