[Vision2020] And Yet another View

[Tom Hansen]

>From the Washington Post (May 6, 2004) -

I copied and paste the article here since the website requires e-mail
registration to access the article.  However, if you must, it is at:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A5840-2004May5.html

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>From the Washington Post (May 6, 2004)

Mr. Rumsfeld's Responsibility

Thursday, May 6, 2004; Page A34

THE HORRIFIC abuses by American interrogators and guards at the Abu Ghraib
prison and at other facilities maintained by the U.S. military in Iraq and
Afghanistan can be traced, in part, to policy decisions and public
statements of Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld. Beginning more than
two years ago, Mr. Rumsfeld decided to overturn decades of previous practice
by the U.S. military in its handling of detainees in foreign countries. His
Pentagon ruled that the United States would no longer be bound by the Geneva
Conventions; that Army regulations on the interrogation of prisoners would
not be observed; and that many detainees would be held incommunicado and
without any independent mechanism of review. Abuses will take place in any
prison system. But Mr. Rumsfeld's decisions helped create a lawless regime
in which prisoners in both Iraq and Afghanistan have been humiliated,
beaten, tortured and murdered -- and in which, until recently, no one has
been held accountable.

The lawlessness began in January 2002 when Mr. Rumsfeld publicly declared
that hundreds of people detained by U.S. and allied forces in Afghanistan
"do not have any rights" under the Geneva Conventions. That was not the
case: At a minimum, all those arrested in the war zone were entitled under
the conventions to a formal hearing to determine whether they were prisoners
of war or unlawful combatants. No such hearings were held, but then Mr.
Rumsfeld made clear that U.S. observance of the convention was now optional.
Prisoners, he said, would be treated "for the most part" in "a manner that
is reasonably consistent" with the conventions -- which, the secretary
breezily suggested, was outdated.

In one important respect, Mr. Rumsfeld was correct: Not only could captured
al Qaeda members be legitimately deprived of Geneva Convention guarantees
(once the required hearing was held) but such treatment was in many cases
necessary to obtain vital intelligence and prevent terrorists from
communicating with confederates abroad. But if the United States was to
resort to that exceptional practice, Mr. Rumsfeld should have established
procedures to ensure that it did so without violating international
conventions against torture and that only suspects who truly needed such
extraordinary handling were treated that way. Outside controls or
independent reviews could have provided such safeguards. Instead, Mr.
Rumsfeld allowed detainees to be indiscriminately designated as beyond the
law -- and made humane treatment dependent on the goodwill of U.S.
personnel.

Much of what has happened at the U.S. detention center in Guantanamo Bay is
shrouded in secrecy. But according to an official Army report, a system was
established at the camp under which military guards were expected to "set
the conditions" for intelligence investigations. The report by Maj. Gen.
Antonio M. Taguba says the system was later introduced at military
facilities at Bagram airbase in Afghanistan and the Abu Ghraib prison in
Iraq, even though it violates Army regulations forbidding guards to
participate in interrogations.

The Taguba report and others by human rights groups reveal that the
detention system Mr. Rumsfeld oversees has become so grossly distorted that
military police have abused or tortured prisoners under the direction of
civilian contractors and intelligence officers outside the military chain of
command -- not in "exceptional" cases, as Mr. Rumsfeld said Tuesday, but
systematically. Army guards have held "ghost" prisoners detained by the CIA
and even hidden these prisoners from the International Red Cross. Meanwhile,
Mr. Rumsfeld's contempt for the Geneva Conventions has trickled down: The
Taguba report says that guards at Abu Ghraib had not been instructed on them
and that no copies were posted in the facility.

The abuses that have done so much harm to the U.S. mission in Iraq might
have been prevented had Mr. Rumsfeld been responsive to earlier reports of
violations. Instead, he publicly dismissed or minimized such accounts. He
and his staff ignored detailed reports by respected human rights groups
about criminal activity at U.S.-run prisons in Afghanistan, and they refused
to provide access to facilities or respond to most questions. In December
2002, two Afghan detainees died in events that were ruled homicides by
medical officials; only when the New York Times obtained the story did the
Pentagon confirm that an investigation was underway, and no results have yet
been announced. Not until other media obtained the photos from Abu Ghraib
did Mr. Rumsfeld fully acknowledge what had happened, and not until Tuesday
did his department disclose that 25 prisoners have died in U.S. custody in
Iraq and Afghanistan. Accountability for those deaths has been virtually
nonexistent: One soldier was punished with a dishonorable discharge.

On Monday Mr. Rumsfeld's spokesman said that the secretary had not read Mr.
Taguba's report, which was completed in early March. Yesterday Mr. Rumsfeld
told a television interviewer that he still hadn't finished reading it, and
he repeated his view that the Geneva Conventions "did not precisely apply"
but were only "basic rules" for handling prisoners. His message remains the
same: that the United States need not be bound by international law and that
the crimes Mr. Taguba reported are not, for him, a priority. That attitude
has undermined the American military's observance of basic human rights and
damaged this country's ability to prevail in the war on terrorism.

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Take care,

Tom Hansen
Not On The Palouse, Not Ever