One of the topics that I haven't weighed in on yet is the bipartisan Senate Armed Services Committee report on detainee abuse at Guantanamo Bay and in Afghanistan and Iraq. At first I assumed that the story was going to be so well covered that I didn't need to write about torture again, and then I got busy. But as Glenn Greenwald chronicles, the story was almost entirely ignored by everyone outside the blogosphere:
The bipartisan Senate Armed Services Committee report issued on Thursday -- which documents that "former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other senior U.S. officials share much of the blame for detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba" and "that Rumsfeld's actions were 'a direct cause of detainee abuse' at Guantanamo and 'influenced and contributed to the use of abusive techniques ... in Afghanistan and Iraq'" -- raises an obvious and glaring question: how can it possibly be justified that the low-level Army personnel carrying out these policies at Abu Ghraib have been charged, convicted and imprisoned, while the high-level political officials and lawyers who directed and authorized these same policies remain free of any risk of prosecution? The culpability which the Report assigns for these war crimes is vast in scope and unambiguous:
The executive summary also traces the erosion of detainee treatment standards to a Feb,. 7, 2002, memorandum signed by President George W. Bush stating that the Geneva Convention did not apply to the U.S. war with al Qaeda and that Taliban detainees were not entitled to prisoner of war status or legal protections. "The president's order closed off application of Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, which would have afforded minimum standards for humane treatment," the summary said. Members of Bush's Cabinet and other senior officials participated in meetings inside the White House in 2002 and 2003 where specific interrogation techniques were discussed, according to the report.The policies which the Senate Armed Services Committee unanimously concludes were authorized by Bush, Rumsfeld and several other top Bush officials did not merely lead to "abuse" and humiliating treatment, but are directly -- and unquestionably -- responsible for numerous detainee murders. Many of those deaths caused by abusive treatment have been formally characterized as "homicides" by autopsies performed in Iraq and Afghanistan (see these chilling compilations of autopsy findings on detainees in U.S. custody, obtained by the ACLU, which reads like a classic and compelling exhibit in a war crimes trial).
A bipartisan report issued without a single dissent explicitly connects senior administration officials and even the president himself to war crimes, and the entire country just shrugs its shoulders and moves on?
The Senate's bipartisan report, issued with no dissents, reiterates and adds factual context to what we already know. And there is no equivocation in the report.
The person who authorized all the abuse and torture at Abu Ghraib, the man who gave the green light to the abuses in that prison, is the president of the United States, George W. Bush.Again: there is no longer any reasonable factual debate about this (hence to near total silence of the Republican right), and the Senate report finally holds the president responsible in bipartisan fashion:
The abuse of detainees in U.S. custody cannot simply be attributed to the actions of "a few bad apples" acting on their own. The fact is that senior officials in the United States government solicited information on how to use aggressive techniques, redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorized their use against detainees. Those efforts damaged our ability to collect accurate intelligence that could save lives, strengthened the hand of our enemies, and compromised our moral authority.Those ghastly pctures of naked, hooded prisoners? Bush approved nudity and hooding of prisoners. Hypothermia? Sleep deprivation? Bush signed a memo removing the most baseline protections for all human beings under the Geneva Conventions. Waterboarding? Bush knew full well. As did Rice and Tenet and Powell and that poseur in defense of human rights, Paul Wolfowitz. But even before the memo, before any prisoners were captured, the Bush administration was working on how to torture them:
In December 2001, more than a month before the President signed his memorandum, the Department of Defense (DoD) General Counsel's Office had already solicited information on detainee "exploitation" from the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency (JPRA), an agency whose expertise was in training American personnel to withstand interrogation techniques considered illegal under the Geneva Conventions.Let's be absolutely clear what this means: When we saw an image of Lynndie England pulling a naked prisoner around on a leash, we assumed at the time that she improvised this, or was some kind of "bad apple." This is and was a conscious lie to the Congress, and to the American people, and to the world. The person who authorized the use of nudity and leashes on prisoners was not Lynndie England or any of the other grunts thrown to the wolves.
It gets worse:
The torture and abuse techniques authorized by the president of the United States were drawn from methods designed by the Communist Chinese to extract false confessions from broken human beings (although many of the torture methods - from hypothermia to sleep deprivation - had been pioneered by the Gestapo using George Tenet's precise phrase "enhanced interrogation". The historical proof of this is here - and Americans tried and executed those responsible for the same techniques now used by the president of the United States.)
Of all of the people involved in this, the one's I've always thought should be held least accountable are the enlisted men and women who were put into the middle of this god-awful mess, and yet so far they are the only ones who have been held accountable. This makes less than no sense. The entire premise of the chain of command in the military is that responsibility flows up the chain, not down. When people are issuing orders that might send people to their death, there simply is no other way for things to work. And yet in this instance, things have been deliberately manipulated by the administration, its defenders, and by some of the military brass to make sure that we only look down and not up.
The report tells us that when photos and other evidence of abuse first surfaced, the Bush Administration firmly denied any connection between their policies and the abuse, then attempted to scapegoat a group of more than a dozen young recruits (but not, of course, any of their supervising officers, who knew the details of the administration's involvement and would have made things messy if disciplined). The report puts these actions in an unforgiving light:
The abuse of detainees in U.S. custody cannot simply be attributed to the actions of 'a few bad apples' acting on their own. The fact is that senior officials in the United States government solicited information on how to use aggressive techniques, redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorized their use against detainees.
One final point before I let this go, and for that I head back to Andrew:
The MSM also made torture possible - especially cable news. Even PBS demanded that guests not use the word torture to decribe torture. The issue was barely present in the last campagn; and Bush has not been asked about his war crimes in any single exit interview so far. The AP and the NYT and the WaPo collude in robbing the English language of its plain meaning. This is not to bely that amazing work that many MSM reporters have done - from Dana Priest and Jane Mayer to Scott Horton and Charlie Savage. But so many of their editors seem unable to tell the truth about this country's war crimes in the past seven years.
The fact that it all this is inconvenient and uncomfortable makes it more important to speak the truth, not less. And yet up and down the line, there's silence.
This country has not always been this way. From the time of George Washington straight through to the Greatest Generation, we were better than this. We did not behave this way. We stood up to fight those who engaged in this sort of behavior. What has changed? Where did it all go so wrong?
