WASHINGTON
- The Bush administration's contention that the sexual
humiliation and physical abuse of Iraqi detainees at Abu
Ghraib prison as depicted in photographs first disclosed
two weeks ago were the work of just a "few bad apples"
from a poorly trained military police unit is fast
becoming untenable.
Human rights groups and US
lawmakers have made clear in the past several days that
they had submitted to the administration from the outset
of its "war on terror" a series of reports of widespread
and systemic violations of the Geneva Conventions, not
only in Iraq but in Afghanistan, and even at the US navy
base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
The Abu Ghraib
scandal, which has so far prompted several public
apologies by President George W Bush and three
nationally televised hearings in the US Congress, has
resulted in a sharp drop in public support for the US
occupation in Iraq, according to two polls released this
week by Gallup and the Pew Research Center. According to
the polls, more than three quarters of respondents said
they had seen the photos, and half said they marked a
"major setback" to US strategy in Iraq.
The
accounts of former detainees themselves - in Iraq,
Afghanistan and Guantanamo - have also put a question
over the Pentagon's insistence that it has provided
humane treatment to prisoners under its control.
Moreover, a list of approved interrogation techniques -
among them sleep deprivation, prolonged isolation and
the presence of military dogs - provided by the Pentagon
to congressional committees this week includes some that
are prohibited not only by the Geneva Conventions, but
also by existing US military manuals.
For
example, a 1983 manual states "prolonged solitary
confinement for the purpose of extracting information in
questioning violates policy" and "extreme deprivation of
sensory stimuli ... is a form of torture". Both
techniques, which are authorized under the newly
disclosed list subject to approval by the commanding
general, have reportedly been used against detainees.
"Stress and duress" interrogation techniques -
in which detainees are forced to stand or assume other
positions in ways that induce physical stress or pain
over time - have also been often applied against Iraqi
and Afghan detainees, according to reports by rights
groups and the International Committee of the Red Cross
(ICRC), although they, too, are discouraged by US
military manuals. Under the guidelines for Iraq, they
are supposed to be employed only with a commander's
approval.
Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld and the
chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Richard
Myers, insisted in congressional testimony on Wednesday
that all guidelines had been vetted by Pentagon lawyers
to ensure compliance with the conventions. (The
administration has said detainees at Guantanamo are not
subject to the conventions, although it has promised to
treat them in a manner that is "consistent" with them.)
But they were partially contradicted on Thursday
by their two deputies, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul
Wolfowitz and the chief's vice chairman, General Peter
Pace. They both told senators they did not know who in
the Pentagon hierarchy had authorized the use of such
techniques, and Pace said he would consider the binding
by a Marine of a naked and hooded enemy in a stressful
position - as depicted in a videotape of an Iraqi
detainee - to violate the Geneva Conventions. After some
prompting, Wolfowitz agreed.
According to one
account in Thursday's Washington Post, several military
lawyers who were knowledgeable about the interrogation
guidelines appealed to a senior representative of the
New York State Bar Association to try to persuade the
Pentagon to revise them due to concern that they
violated the conventions. "None of these techniques is
legal," according to Kenneth Roth, executive director of
Human Rights Watch (HRW), who wrote in the Washington
Post on Thursday that he worried that the photos of
sexual humiliation risked overshadowing the more common
use of "stress and duress" tactics.
London-based
Amnesty International, which has also submitted several
reports of abuses against detainees in Afghanistan and
Iraq, issued its own statement Thursday on the subject.
"These techniques of torture or cruel, inhuman or
degrading treatment are grave breaches of the Fourth
Geneva Convention, amounting to war crimes, and violate
the Convention Against Torture to which the US is a
state party," it said.
But US abuses have gone
far beyond those associated with interrogation,
according to the two groups. HRW released a statement on
Thursday charging that mistreatment and abuse of
detainees in Afghanistan have been "systemic", and
called for the Pentagon to immediately open detention
facilities under its control to independent monitors, an
appeal in which Amnesty joined in a separate statement
on Thursday.
In a March report entitled
"Enduring Freedom: Abuses by US Forces in Afghanistan",
HRW detailed a series of problems that it said had
become "routine" in Afghanistan, ranging from beatings,
sometimes quite severe; dousing with cold water or
exposure to freezing temperatures; "stress and duress"
techniques; sleep and sensory deprivation; forced
nakedness and being photographed while naked.
Much the same story was told in an account that
appeared in Wednesday's New York Times about an Afghan
police colonel who had been detained for six weeks last
summer. He said that while in custody he was beaten,
stripped naked and sexually abused by his captors, who
accused him of working with the Taliban. He had
submitted testimony about his experience to the Afghan
Human Rights Commission after his release, but the
commission received no reply to its request for a
meeting.
"There is compelling evidence
suggesting that US personnel have committed acts against
detainees amounting to cruel, inhumane or degrading
treatment," said Brad Adams who directs HRW's Asia
division. He added that the Pentagon has still not
reported the results of investigations of two detainees'
deaths in 2002, two of which were labelled "homicides"
by US doctors.
The US Army admits it is
investigating 10 prisoner deaths in US custody in Iraq
and Afghanistan, and another 10 cases of abuse. The
number of prisoner deaths in US custody in the two
countries stands at 14. Three US reservists are to be
court-martialled for carrying out physical and sexual
abuse of Iraqi prisoners. A number of other soldiers
have been formally accused or suspended.
But to
a growing number of observers, the pattern of detainee
abuses in Afghanistan and Iraq appears strikingly
similar. "It appears to be exactly the same techniques
used in Afghanistan as were used in Iraq," Senator
Patrick Leahy told Rumsfeld on Wednesday. "I don't think
they're getting their techniques over the Internet.
There's obviously some systemic training."
While
Rumsfeld, who flew to Baghdad on Thursday, demurred,
Leahy said he had pressed the administration for 11
months about abuses reported by rights groups and the
media but had never received a persuasive reply other
than an assurance that the US military was abiding by
the conventions.
