A barrelful of Rotten Apples

Washington Post indicts Bush Administration for war crimes

From today's lead editorial in the Washington Post:

...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 Guantanamo 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...

The Post editorial page has now used its considerable conservative microphone to emphasize what Deep Blade has been saying for months: a dozen or so low-level operatives are not the biggest problem -- it is the Pentagon leadership, the White House, and the Republican Congress that are the real Rotten Apples where torture is concerned. US atrocities against prisoners are far more than "isolated aberrations" -- indeed torture underpins US policy.

Documents released this week through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union revealed that the torturers had "their marching orders from the Sec Def", according to one of the items released. This memo was discussed by salon.com writer Joe Conason Tuesday on Democracy Now!:

What it says is that the F.B.I. argued strongly against abusive techniques in Guantanamo, and argued with two ranking generals, General Dunlavey and General Geoffrey Miller who figured largely in the Abu Ghraib scandal because he went to Iraq after setting up the system at Guantanamo, and that the response of the military was, of these generals was, you can try your methods, but we have our marching orders from the SecDef, which is what the memo says and the SecDef is military jargon for the Secretary of Defense. In other words, this is an acknowledgement by the F.B.I. in the internal memo that the military was behaving towards these prisoners in a manner that had been ordered by Donald Rumsfeld's office. That the allegations of abuse and in some cases torture had grown out of an attitude that ordinary conventions and international law did not have to be observed in the treatment of these prisoners.

And "treatment" these prisoners did receive, to wit:

* Mock executions

* Simulated drowning on "waterboards"

* Cuffing and pouring cold water on a subject in an act called the scorpion

* Beatings, chokings, prolonged sleep deprivation and humiliations such as being wrapped in an Israeli flag with loud music blaring

* Dragging feet over barbed wire

* Burning with flammable liquids and cigarettes, including inside the ear

After searching for the slightest bit of administration accountability and failing to find it, the Post to concludes with this lament:

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...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.

The absence of significant public demand upon the courts and our elected representatives to put an end to this treatment and give those who are criminally culpable the severest punishment is shameful. I feel great revulsion towards this behavior and the failure of our system to do a damn thing about it. We better be careful. These are exactly the sorts of acts President George W. Bush has continually stated were the crimes of Saddam that justified American conquest of Iraq. Is it such a stretch to think new-formed enemies of America could use the same justification for reciprocal attacks?