WASHINGTON
- The United States has failed to change its
policies meaningfully on the treatment of prisoners, opening the
door to repeats of abuses like those at Iraq's Abu
Ghraib prison and making an independent probe into
torture by the US military essential, says a leading
human-rights group.
In a 200-page report
released on Wednesday, London-based Amnesty
International (AI) stressed that without such an
investigation and the clear, unequivocal rejection by US
officials of torture and ill-treatment of prisoners,
"the conditions remain for further abuses to occur".
Six months after CBS television's 60
Minutes broadcast photos of US
soldiers abusing Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib prison
outside Baghdad, AI welcomed a number of
Pentagon-sponsored probes into the torture and other
abuse of prisoners there, but it warned that such
invetigations alone were insufficient to deal with the
problem.
"Many questions remain unanswered,
responsible individuals are beyond the scope of
investigation, policies that facilitate torture remain
in place, and prisoners continue to be held in secret
detention," said William Schulz, executive director of
the US section of Amnesty (AIUSA).
"The failure
to substantially change policy and practice after the
scandal of Abu Ghraib leaves the US government
completely lacking in credibility when it asserts its
opposition to torture," he said in a statement.
The report also calls on US President George W
Bush to make public and rescind any measures or
directives authorized by him or any other official that
could be interpreted as authorizing "disappearances",
torture, or other inhuman treatment.
The AI
report was released amid almost daily revelations about
how decades-old US policies regarding the treatment of
prisoners of war were either circumvented or ignored by
small groups of Bush administration political appointees
who argued that those policies were obsolete in waging
what one White House memorandum called a "new kind of
war".
Investigative articles appearing over the
past three days in the New York Times have described how
top lawyers in the Pentagon, Vice President Dick
Cheney's office, the Justice Department and the White
House kept Bush's own National Security Adviser
Condoleezza Rice, the State Department and career
military attorneys in the dark about their plans for
"military commissions" that deprived suspects in the
"war on terrorism" of basic rights under domestic and
international law.
At the same time, the
Washington Post reported that the Central Intelligence
Agency (CIA), with the Pentagon's cooperation, had
secretly transferred dozens of non-Iraqi prisoners out
of Iraq after the March 2003 invasion, under an opinion
by political appointees in the Justice Department's
Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), in direct defiance of the
1949 Geneva Conventions on the treatment of prisoners of
war.
The revelations come on top of disclosures
since the Abu Ghraib scandal last April of legal
memoranda prepared by political appointees that appeared
to justify the use of torture and ill-treatment against
detainees, practices that had been explicitly prohibited
by US Armed Forces field manuals over the past several
decades.
All of these disclosures have
contributed to calls by AI and other groups, including
Human Rights Watch (HRW) and Human Rights First, dating
back to last April and May, for a comprehensive
independent probe of torture and abuses. In a resolution
passed last summer, the American Bar Association (ABA)
also urged such a move.
Until now, the Bush
administration ignored these calls, arguing that the
Pentagon's own efforts to investigate and prosecute
abuses were adequate for dealing with the issue.
This month, for example, the US Army's
Criminal Investigation Division recommended that 28
soldiers be charged in connection with the beating
deaths of two prisoners at a detention facility in
Afghanistan in December 2002, while some seven military
police are being prosecuted or have pleaded guilty to
charges arising from the Abu Ghraib abuses.
Last
Thursday one army reservist, the highest-ranking soldier
charged after the Abu Ghraib scandal exploded in the
international media, was sentenced to eight years in
prison for abuse.
Amnesty's new report, "Human
Dignity Denied: Torture and Accountability in the 'War
on Terror'," documents what it calls a pattern of
human-rights violations running from Afghanistan to Abu
Ghraib via Guantanamo Bay, Cuba (where prisoners in the
"war on terror" were taken to a specially constructed
detention facility that the Bush administration
maintained was outside the jurisdiction of US law), and
to other "secret" overseas detention facilities about
which the administration has said virtually nothing.
The report stressed that no senior US officials
have yet been held accountable.
Noting the
administration's claims that prosecuting the "war on
terror" after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks
on New York and the Pentagon required "new thinking",
the report finds the administration's ideas about how to
fight the war fit a "historically familiar pattern of
violating human rights in the name of national
security".
It argues that decisions linked to
torture start at the very top. Secretary of Defense
Donald Rumsfeld, for example, explicitly authorized a
number of abuses - including stripping, isolation,
hooding, stress positions, sensory deprivation, the use
of dogs in interrogations and secret detentions, which
amount to serious human-rights violations and, in some
cases, torture, the report said.
"The denial of
habeas corpus, the use of incommunicado and secret
detention - in some cases amounting to 'disappearance' -
and the sanctioning of harsh interrogation techniques
are classic but flawed responses," Amnesty International
said. "By lowering safeguards, demonizing detainees, and
displaying a disregard for its international legal
obligations, the administration at best sowed confusion
among interrogators and at worst gave the green light to
torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading
treatment."
Amnesty said the sheer number of
abuses in Afghanistan and Iraq that have come to light
through media leaks or official Pentagon investigations
has "punctured the administration's assertions that
torture and ill-treatment were restricted to Abu Ghraib
and a few aberrant soldiers".
An independent
commission of credible experts should be formed to call
on the advice of international groups and agencies that
specialize in such investigations, including the United
Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture, the report
recommends.
It should be empowered to
investigate all levels and agencies of the US
government, including the CIA, whose operations -
including secret transfers of detainees to other
countries - have so far largely escaped scrutiny.
Any commission should also include within
its scope recommendations for preventing future torture
and ill-treatment of detainees in US custody, beginning with
a clear requirement that the highest administration
officials must make clear their absolute and unequivocal
opposition to torture and abuse under any circumstances.
Such a move is indispensable in light of the
memoranda prepared by the administration to justify
abuses. "What these documents show is a two-faced
strategy to torture," according to Amnesty
International. "It has been a case of proclaim your
opposition to torture in public, while in private
discuss how your president can order torture and how
government agents can escape criminal liability for
torture."
