[Ppnews] Pentagon Officials Accused Iraqis Of War Crimes Days After U.S. Invasion

[Political Prisoner News]

Pentagon Officials Accused Iraqis Of War Crimes Days After U.S. Invasion
http://www.pubrecord.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=143

By Jason Leopold
The Public Record
Wednesday, June 18, 2008

Favoured : 4

Published in : 
<http://www.pubrecord.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=category&sectionid=1&id=1>Nation/World

U.S. government documents, detailing how Bush 
administration officials punched legalistic holes 
in the Geneva Convention’s protections of war 
captives, stand in stark contrast to the outrage 
some of the same officials expressed in the first 
week of the Iraq War when Iraqi TV interviewed 
several captured American soldiers.

Then, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, 
President George W. Bush and other administration 
officials orchestrated a chorus of outrage, 
citing those TV scenes as proof of the Iraq’s 
government contempt for international law in 
general and the Geneva Convention in particular.

“It is a blatant violation of the Geneva 
Convention to humiliate and abuse prisoners of 
war or to harm them in any way. As President Bush 
said yesterday, those who harm POWs will be found 
and punished as war criminals,” 
<http://www.defenselink.mil/transcripts/transcript.aspx?transcriptid=2134>Pentagon 
spokeswoman Victoria Clarke said on March 24, 2003.

That same day, Deputy Defense Secretary 
<http://www.defenselink.mil/transcripts/transcript.aspx?transcriptid=2139.>Paul 
Wolfowitz told the BBC that “the Geneva 
Convention is very clear on the rules for 
treating prisoners. They're not supposed to be 
tortured or abused, they're not supposed to be 
intimidated, they're not supposed to be made 
public displays of humiliation or insult, and 
we're going to be in a position to hold those 
Iraqi officials who are mistreating our prisoners 
accountable, and they've got to stop.”

At 
<http://www.defenselink.mil/transcripts/transcript.aspx?transcriptid=2141>a 
March 25, 2003, press briefing about progress in 
the U.S.-led invasion, Secretary Rumfeld said, 
“This war is an act of self defense, to be sure, 
but it is also an act of humanity. 
 In recent 
days, the world has witnessed further evidence of 
their [Iraqi] brutality and their disregard for 
the laws of war. Their treatment of coalition 
POWs is a violation of the Geneva Conventions.”

The U.S. news media also assisted in this 
one-sided indictment by uncritically reporting 
the administration’s complaints while staying 
silent on the fact that just days earlier, 
American TV had run scenes of captured Iraqi 
soldiers, some forced to kneel down at gunpoint 
to be patted down by U.S. soldiers.

This behavior of the U.S. news media during the 
early phase of the Iraq War fit with its lack of 
skepticism in the months leading up to the March 
19, 2003, invasion as Bush administration 
officials spoon-fed the press false intelligence 
alleging secret Iraqi WMD stockpiles and covert 
links to al-Qaeda terrorists responsible for the 9/11 attacks.

So, perhaps it should have come as no surprise 
when the U.S. news media treated the TV footage 
of American POWs as further evidence that Iraq 
was run by a lawless regime with no respect for 
the rules of war. [For a contemporaneous account 
of the POW issue, see Consortiumnews.com’s 
“<http://www.consortiumnews.com/2003/032503a.html>International 
Law a la Carte.”]

Stunning Hypocrisy

In retrospect – now with much more of the 
documentary record available – the disparity 
between the administration’s outrage toward the 
Iraqis for showing the video and the abuse 
inflicted by the U.S. government on captives from 
the Iraq and Afghan wars is stunning.

Declassified documents reveal that the Bush 
administration concocted legal theories to 
justify sidestepping the Geneva Convention when 
it came to prisoners incarcerated at Guantanamo 
Bay, at secret CIA prisons and at various 
locations in Iraq, including Abu Ghraib where 
shocking photos were leaked of sexual and physical abuse in 2004.

Indeed, while U.S. government officials were 
preaching to Iraqis about the rules of war, the 
Bush administration was seven months into a 
secret interrogation program that authorized CIA 
interrogators to question Afghan and al-Qaeda detainees using brutal methods.

The techniques included painful “stress 
positions,” forced nudity in cold conditions and 
the simulated drowning of waterboarding, 
practices that human rights organizations say 
violated Geneva and anti-torture laws.

The Bush administration also ordered the CIA to 
engage in “extraordinary renditions,” which 
involved kidnapping terror suspects and shipping 
them to countries that are known to practice torture.

If held to the same standards that the Bush 
administration demanded of the Iraqi military, 
U.S. officials implicated in these policies would 
be guilty of violating the Geneva Convention, 
said Claire Tixeire, a "human rights fellow" with 
the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York and an attorney.

“They clearly knew that the laws of war were 
supposed to apply to prisoners apprehended by the 
United States in Afghanistan and Iraq, but they 
found every legal loophole to find ways it didn't 
apply to the U.S. side,” Tixeire said in an interview.

Tixeire, whose organization is defending some of 
the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, said that while 
U.S. officials may have had a point in accusing 
the Iraqi military of violating the Geneva 
Convention over the TV interviews, the way the 
U.S. treated Iraqi captives was much worse.

“It’s clear to me these actions came down from 
the very top,” Tixeire said. “Denying prisoners 
of war humane treatment is a grave breach of the 
Geneva Convention. It's a war crime. They put 
U.S. troops at risk for being treated inhumanely if they were captured.”

When asked recently about the past statements 
about Iraqi violations of the Geneva Convention, 
representatives for Clarke, Wolfowitz and 
Rumsfeld said the now-former officials would not comment for this story.

Anti-Torture Laws

The actions of the Bush administration also 
flouted the 1984 "Convention Against Torture and 
Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or 
Punishment," which was approved by 145 nations, 
including the United States. It declares that:

"No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether 
a state of war or a threat of war, internal 
political instability or any other public 
emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture."

Moreover, the convention says individuals who 
resort to torture cannot defend their actions by 
saying they were acting on orders from superiors 
and it mandates that torturers be prosecuted wherever they are found.

The United States signed the Convention Against 
Torture in 1988 under President Ronald Reagan, 
who hailed it as “a significant step” in 
preventing torture, which he called “an abhorrent 
practice unfortunately still prevalent in the world today.”

In a May 20, 1988, message to the U.S. Senate, 
Reagan noted that “the core provisions of the 
Convention establish a regime for international 
cooperation in the criminal prosecution of 
torturers relying on so-called ‘universal jurisdiction.’”

According to that provision, “each state party is 
required either to prosecute torturers who are 
found in its territory or to extradite them to 
other countries for prosecution.”

It was this Convention, ratified by the Senate in 
1994, that Bush administration officials sought 
to bypass with legal memos, many drafted by John 
Yoo of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel.

The administration memos argued that the Geneva 
Convention did not apply to detainees in the “war 
on terror” and that President Bush’s 
commander-in-chief powers allowed him to ignore 
laws in the interest of protecting the nation.

The record now shows that during the same week in 
March 2003 – when Rumsfeld was publicly berating 
Iraq for violating the Geneva Convention by 
broadcasting footage of American POW’s – he was 
engaged in drafting a top-secret plan that would 
give military interrogators at Guantanamo wide 
latitude to use harsher techniques to obtain information from prisoners.

Rumsfeld signed off on the plan on April 2, 2003, 
according to documents declassified and turned 
over to the American Civil Liberties Union last 
month in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.

Though some of the more extreme techniques were 
dropped as the list was winnowed down to 24 from 
35, the final set of interrogation methods 
Rumsfeld approved still included tactics for 
isolating and demeaning a detainee, known as "pride and ego down."

Such degrading tactics would appear to contravene 
the Geneva Convention, which bars abusive or demeaning treatment of captives.

Reports of Abuse

Weeks after the Iraq invasion, human rights 
groups started receiving information about the 
abuse of dozens of Iraqi prisoners at Camp 
Cropper, Camp Bucca and Abu Ghraib, and the 
deaths of two prisoners, one of whom died of a 
crushed larynx, and the other with a hard blow to the head.

Amnesty International sent a letter to the head 
of the U.S. occupation, Paul Bremer, on June 26, 
2003, raising concerns about abuses during house 
searches, treatment during arrest and detention, 
people being forced to lie face down on the 
ground; use of hoods or blind folds, exposure to 
sun and heat for hours, limited amount of water 
supplied, and lack of proper washing and toilet facilities.

One month later, Amnesty International released a 
report, "Iraq: memorandum on concerns relating to 
law and order," warning of allegations of torture 
and abuse in U.S. prisons, including Abu Ghraib.

"Regrettably, testimonies from recently released 
detainees held at Camp Cropper and Abu Ghraib 
Prison do not suggest that conditions of 
detention have improved," the report said.

There are "a number of reports of cases of 
detainees who have died in custody, mostly as a 
result of shooting by members of the Coalition 
forces." A Saudi national "alleged that he was 
subjected to beatings and electric shocks."

Photographs backing up these allegations would 
surface a year later in two investigative news 
reports, one by Seymour Hersh of The New Yorker 
and the other by "60 Minutes II," which detailed 
the systematic abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib.

Months before the worldwide condemnation of the 
treatment of the Abu Ghraib prisoners, Rumsfeld 
sent Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller was sent to 
Baghdad from Guantanamo Bay to “hit back at the 
[Iraqi] insurgents...through unorthodox means,” 
according to 
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A13065-2004May9?language=printer>a 
May 10, 2004, front-page story in the Washington Post.

"He came up there and told me he was going to 
'Gitmoize' the detention operation," turning it 
into a hub of interrogation, said Brig. Gen. 
Janis L. Karpinski, then commander of the 
military prison system in Iraq, according to the Post.

Hersh wrote in The New Yorker’s 
<http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2004/05/24/040524fa_fact>May 
24, 2004, issue that “the roots of the Abu Ghraib 
prison scandal lie not in the criminal 
inclinations of a few Army reservists but in a 
decision, approved last year [2003] by Secretary 
of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, to expand a highly 
secret operation, which had been focused on the 
hunt for Al Qaeda, to the interrogation of prisoners in Iraq. 


“The solution, endorsed by Rumsfeld and carried 
out by Stephen Cambone, was to get tough with 
those Iraqis in the Army prison system who were 
suspected of being insurgents. 
 Rumsfeld and 
Cambone went a step further, [bringing] 
unconventional methods to Abu Ghraib. 
 The male 
prisoners could be treated roughly, and exposed to sexual humiliation.”

Tarnished Image

Amrit Singh, a staff attorney at the ACLU’s 
Immigrant Rights Project and the co-author of 
<http://www.aclu.org/about/staff/administrationoftorture.html>Administration 
of Torture, added that Rumsfeld and other top 
Bush administration officials by “holding up the 
Geneva Convention and saying it did not apply to 
some prisoners have tarnished the image of the U.S. throughout the world.”

Even after the programs governing interrogations 
were exposed, Rumsfeld made sure that a loophole 
in a new Defense Department policy issued in 
November 2005, which barred torture and called 
for the "humane" treatment of detainees, gave him 
and his deputy the authority to override it.

"Intelligence interrogations will be conducted in 
accordance with applicable law, this directive 
and implementing plans, policies, orders, 
directives, and doctrine developed by DoD 
components and approved by USD (I), unless 
otherwise authorized, in writing, by the 
secretary of defense or deputy secretary of 
defense," the policy says. "USD (I)" refers to 
the undersecretary of defense for intelligence.

Rumsfeld resigned in November 2006.

Last update : Wednesday, June 18, 2008




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