War Crimes Torture

The buck stops here for the hundreds of millions of deaths since WW2.
http://raenergy.igc.org/BushDynasty.html

Question is: What took so long????
http://raenergy.igc.org/Torture.html


   Washington Post
   December 23, 2004
  
   The Washington Post | Editorial

 Bush War Crimes
 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A20986-2004Dec22.html
Thanks to a lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties
  Union and other human rights groups, thousands of
  pages of government documents released this month
  have confirmed some of the painful truths about the
  abuse of foreign detainees by the U.S. military and
  the CIA - truths the Bush administration implacably
  has refused to acknowledge. Since the publication
  of photographs of abuse at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison
  in the spring the administration's whitewashers -
  led by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld - have
  contended that the crimes were carried out by a few
  low-ranking reservists, that they were limited to
  the night shift during a few chaotic months at Abu
  Ghraib in 2003, that they were unrelated to the
  interrogation of prisoners and that no torture
  occurred at the Guantánamo Bay prison where
  hundreds of terrorism suspects are held. The new
  documents establish beyond any doubt that every
  part of this cover story is false.

  Though they represent only part of the record that
  lies in government files, the documents show that
  the abuse of prisoners was already occurring at
  Guantánamo in 2002 and continued in Iraq even after
  the outcry over the Abu Ghraib photographs. F.B.I.
  agents reported in internal e-mails and memos about
  systematic abuses by military interrogators at the
  base in Cuba, including beatings, chokings,
  prolonged sleep deprivation and humiliations such
  as being wrapped in an Israeli flag. "On a couple
  of occasions I entered interview rooms to find a
  detainee chained hand and foot in a fetal position
  to the floor, with no chair, food or water," an
  unidentified F.B.I. agent wrote on Aug. 2, 2004.
  "Most times they had urinated or defecated on
  themselves, and had been left there for 18 to 24
  hours or more." Two defense intelligence officials
  reported seeing prisoners severely beaten in
  Baghdad by members of a special operations unit,
  Task Force 6-26, in June. When they protested they
  were threatened and pictures they took were
  confiscated.

  Other documents detail abuses by Marines in Iraq,
  including mock executions and the torture of
  detainees by burning and electric shock. Several
  dozen detainees have died in U.S. custody. In many
  cases, Army investigations of these crimes were
  shockingly shoddy: Officials lost records, failed
  to conduct autopsies after suspicious deaths and
  allowed evidence to be contaminated. Soldiers found
  to have committed war crimes were excused with
  noncriminal punishments. The summary of one
  suspicious death of a detainee at the Abu Ghraib
  prison reads: "No crime scene exam was conducted,
  no autopsy conducted, no copy of medical file
  obtained for investigation because copy machine
  broken in medical office."

  Some of the abuses can be attributed to lack of
  discipline in some military units - though the
  broad extent of the problem suggests, at best, that
  senior commanders made little effort to prevent or
  control wrongdoing. But the documents also confirm
  that interrogators at Guantánamo believed they were
  following orders from Mr. Rumsfeld. One F.B.I.
  agent reported on May 10 about a conversation he
  had with Guantánamo's commander, Maj. Gen. Geoffrey
  D. Miller, who defended the use of interrogation
  techniques the F.B.I. regarded as illegal on the
  grounds that the military "has their marching
  orders from the Sec Def." Gen. Miller has testified
  under oath that dogs were never used to intimidate
  prisoners at Guantánamo, as authorized by Mr.
  Rumsfeld in December 2002; the F.B.I. papers show
  otherwise.

  The Bush administration refused to release these
  records to the human rights groups under the
  Freedom of Information Act until it was ordered to
  do so by a judge. Now it has responded to their
  publication with bland promises by spokesmen that
  any wrongdoing will be investigated. The record of
  the past few months suggests that the
  administration will neither hold any senior
  official accountable nor change the policies that
  have produced this shameful record. Congress, too,
  has abdicated its responsibility under its
  Republican leadership: It has been nearly four
  months since the last hearing on prisoner abuse.
  Perhaps intervention by the courts will eventually
  stem the violations of human rights that appear to
  be ongoing in Guantánamo, Iraq and Afghanistan. For
  now the appalling truth is that there has been no
  remedy for the documented torture and killing of
  foreign prisoners by this American government.
 
  http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A20986-2004Dec22.html

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