[Peace-discuss] Bush administration knew about Guantanamo abuses

[ppatton at uiuc.edu]

Bush team 'knew of abuse' at Guantánamo

Oliver Burkeman in Washington
Monday September 13, 2004
The Guardian

Evidence of prisoner abuse and possible war crimes at 
Guantánamo Bay reached the highest levels of the Bush 
administration as early as autumn 2002, but Donald Rumsfeld, 
the defence secretary, chose to do nothing about it, 
according to a new investigation published exclusively in the 
Guardian today.

The investigation, by the veteran journalist Seymour Hersh, 
quotes one former marine at the camp recalling sessions in 
which guards would "fuck with [detainees] as much as we 
could" by inflicting pain on them.

The Bush administration repeatedly assured critics that 
inmates were granted recreation periods, but one Pentagon 
adviser told Hersh how, for some prisoners, they consisted of 
being left in straitjackets in intense sunlight with hoods 
over their heads.

Hersh provides details of how President George Bush signed 
off on the establishment of a secret unit that was given 
advance approval to kill or capture and interrogate "high-
value" suspects - considered by many to be in defiance of 
international law - an officially "unacknowledged" programme 
that was eventually transferred wholesale from Guantánamo to 
the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

Hersh, who broke the story of the My Lai massacre in the 
Vietnam war, makes his revelations in a new book, Chain of 
Command, which leaves senior figures in the Bush 
administration far more seriously implicated in the torture 
scandal than had been previously apparent.

A CIA analyst visited Guantánamo in summer 2002 and 
returned "convinced that we were committing war crimes" and 
that "more than half the people there didn't belong there. He 
found people lying in their own faeces," a CIA source told 
Hersh.
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The analyst submitted a report to General John Gordon, an 
aide to Condoleezza Rice, Mr Bush's national security adviser.

Gen Gordon was troubled, and, one former administration 
official told Hersh "that if the actions at Guantánamo ever 
became public, it'd be damaging to the president".

Ms Rice saw the document by autumn of the same year, and 
called a high-level meeting at which she asked Mr Rumsfeld, 
to deal with the problem.

But after he vowed to act, "the Pentagon went into a full-
court stall", a former White House official is quoted as 
saying. "Why didn't Condi do more? She made the same mistake 
I made. She got the secretary of defence to say he's going to 
take care of it."

The investigation further suggests that CIA and FBI staff had 
already witnessed incidents at Guantánamo just as extreme as 
those that would subsequently be alleged by freed inmates.

A senior intelligence official told Hersh: "I was told [by 
FBI agents] that the military guards were slapping prisoners, 
stripping them, pouring cold water over them and making them 
stand until they got hypothermia."

The secret "special access programme" facilitating much of 
the mistreatment of prisoners, widely held to have 
contravened the Geneva convention, was established following 
a direct order from the president.

Hersh reports that a secret document signed by Mr Bush in 
February 2002 stated: "I determine that none of the 
provisions of Geneva apply to our conflict with al-Qaida in 
Afghanistan or elsewhere throughout the world."

Hersh's book reports that an army officer communicated 
concerns over abuses at Abu Ghraib both to General John 
Abizaid, the US central command (Centcom) chief at the time, 
and his deputy, General Lance Smith.

The officer told Hersh: "I said there are systematic abuses 
going on in the prisons. Abizaid didn't say a thing. He 
looked at me - beyond me, as if to say, 'Move on. I don't 
want to touch this.'" Centcom has disputed the allegation.

In an interview with the Guardian, Hersh provided evidence 
that the administration sought to evade the issue: he said 
codenames of some programmes were changed within hours of his 
original story appearing, presumably to maintain their 
secrecy.

In a statement, the Pentagon said Hersh's 
investigation "apparently contains many of the numerous 
unsubstantiated allegations and inaccuracies which he has 
made in the past based upon unnamed sources ... Thus far ... 
investigations have determined that no responsible official 
of the Department of Defence approved any programme that 
could conceivably have authorised or condoned the abuses seen 
at Abu Ghraib. If any of Mr Hersh's anonymous sources wish to 
come forward and offer evidence to the contrary, the 
department welcomes them to do so."

Pressure has been building on the Pentagon over its detention 
policies after it emerged at a Congressional hearing last 
week that the administration is being accused of concealing 
up to 100 "ghost detainees" from the Red Cross, which must be 
granted access to prisoners of war and other detainees under 
the Geneva convention.

Mr Rumsfeld told reporters on Friday he had approved the use 
of harsh interrogation measures, but that they had only been 
meant for Guantánamo. He said the measures ought to be 
contrasted with those of terrorists. "Does it rank up there 
with chopping someone's head off on television?" he 
asked. "It doesn't."
__________________________________________________________________
Dr. Paul Patton
Research Scientist
Beckman Institute  Rm 3027  405 N. Mathews St.
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign  Urbana, Illinois 61801
work phone: (217)-265-0795   fax: (217)-244-5180
home phone: (217)-344-5812
homepage: http://netfiles.uiuc.edu/ppatton/www/index.html

"The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious.  It is the
source of all true art and science."
-Albert Einstein
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