Key Army general accuses Bush administration of war crimes over prisoner abuse

TwinCities.com

The Army general who led the investigation into prisoner abuse at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison accused the Bush administration Wednesday of committing "war crimes" and called for those responsible to be held to account. The remarks by retired Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba came in a new report that found that U.S. personnel tortured and abused detainees in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, using beatings, electrical shocks, sexual humiliation and other cruel practices.


"After years of disclosures by government investigations, media accounts and reports from human rights organizations, there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes," Taguba wrote. "The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account."


Taguba, whose 2004 investigation documented chilling abuses at Abu Ghraib, is thought to be the most senior official to have accused the administration of war crimes. "The commander in chief and those under him authorized a systematic regime of torture," he wrote.


[..]Doctors and mental-health experts examined 11 detainees held for long periods in the prison system that President Bush established after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. All of them were eventually released without charges. The doctors and experts determined the men had been subject to cruelties that ranged from isolation, sleep deprivation and hooding to electric shocks, beatings and, in one case, being forced to drink urine.


The report concludes that former detainees are suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and injuries that can be traced to their imprisonment. "Some of these men really are, several years later, very severely scarred," said Barry Rosenfeld, a psychology professor at Fordham University who conducted psychological tests on six of the 11 detainees covered by the study. "It's a testimony to how bad those conditions were and how personal the abuse was."


Bush has said repeatedly that the United States doesn't condone torture.


[..]"All credible allegations of abuse are thoroughly investigated and, if substantiated, those responsible are held accountable," said Navy Cmdr. J.D. Gordon, a Pentagon spokesman.


The Defense Department responds to concerns raised by the International Committee for the Red Cross, he said, which has access to detainees under military control.


"It adds little to the public discourse to draw sweeping conclusions based upon dubious allegations regarding remote medical assessments of former detainees, now far removed from detention," Gordon said.


The physicians group said its experts, who had experience studying torture's effects, spent two days with each former captive and conducted intensive exams and interviews. They administered tests to detect exaggeration. In two of the 11 cases, the group was able to review medical records.


The report, "Broken Laws, Broken Lives," concurs with a five-part McClatchy investigation of Guantanamo published this week. Among its findings were that abuse occurred -- primarily at prisons in Afghanistan where detainees were held en route to Guantanamo -- and that many of the prisoners were wrongly detained.


Also this week, a probe by the Senate Armed Services Committee revealed how senior Pentagon officials pushed for harsher interrogation methods over the objections of top military lawyers. Those methods later surfaced in Afghanistan and Iraq.


Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld didn't specifically approve of the worst abuses, but neither he nor the White House enforced strict limits on how detainees would be treated. There was no "bright line of abuse which could not be transgressed," former Navy general counsel Alberto Mora told the Senate committee.


Leonard Rubenstein, president of Physicians for Human Rights, said there was a direct connection between the Pentagon decisions and the abuse his group uncovered. "The result was a horrific stew of pain, degradation and ... suffering," he said.