[Peace-discuss] Senate on Bush & murder

[C. G. Estabrook]

[Obama Disease -- ignoring planning for murder -- spreads.  --CGE]

	Published on Monday, December 15, 2008 by Salon.com
	Senate Report Links Bush to Detainee Homicides; Media Yawns
	by Glenn Greenwald

The bipartisan Senate Armed Services Committee report [1] issued on Thursday -- 
which documents [2] that "former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other 
senior U.S. officials share much of the blame for detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib 
prison in Iraq, and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba" and "that Rumsfeld's actions were 'a 
direct cause of detainee abuse' at Guantanamo and 'influenced and contributed to 
the use of abusive techniques ... in Afghanistan and Iraq'" -- raises an obvious 
and glaring question:  how can it possibly be justified that the low-level Army 
personnel carrying out these policies at Abu Ghraib have been charged, convicted 
and imprisoned, while the high-level political officials and lawyers who 
directed and authorized these same policies remain free of any risk of 
prosecution?   The culpability which the Report assigns for these war crimes is 
vast in scope and unambiguous:

     The executive summary also traces the erosion of detainee treatment 
standards to a Feb,. 7, 2002, memorandum signed by President George W. Bush 
stating that the Geneva Convention did not apply to the U.S. war with al Qaeda 
and that Taliban detainees were not entitled to prisoner of war status or legal 
protections.

     "The president's order closed off application of Common Article 3 of the 
Geneva Conventions, which would have afforded minimum standards for humane 
treatment," the summary said.

     Members of Bush's Cabinet and other senior officials participated in 
meetings inside the White House in 2002 and 2003 where specific interrogation 
techniques were discussed, according to the report.

The policies which the Senate Armed Services Committee unanimously concludes 
were authorized by Bush, Rumsfeld and several other top Bush officials did not 
merely lead to "abuse" and humiliating treatment, but are directly -- and 
unquestionably -- responsible for numerous detainee murders.  Many of those 
deaths caused by abusive treatment have been formally characterized as 
"homicides" by autopsies performed in Iraq and Afghanistan (see these chilling 
compilations of autopsy findings [3] on detainees in U.S. custody, obtained by 
the ACLU, which reads like a classic and compelling exhibit in a war crimes trial).

While the bulk of the attention over detainee abuse has been directed to 
Guantanamo, the U.S., to this day, continues to imprison -- with no charges -- 
thousands of Iraqi citizens.  In Iraq and Afghanistan, detainee deaths were 
rampant and, to this day, detainees continue to die under extremely suspicious 
circumstances.  Just yesterday, there was yet another death of a very young 
Iraqi detainee [4] whose death was attributed to quite unlikely natural causes.

     The U.S. military says a detainee has died of an apparent heart attack 
while in custody at a U.S. detention facility in Baghdad.

     Monday's statement says the 25-year-old man was pronounced dead by doctors 
at a combat hospital after losing consciousness at Camp Cropper. . . .

     The U.S. military is holding thousands of prisoners at Camp Cropper near 
the Baghdad airport and Camp Bucca in the southern desert.

For years, it has been common to attribute detainee deaths to "heart attacks" 
where the evidence makes clear that abusive interrogation techniques and other 
inhumane treatment -- the very policies authorized at the highest levels of the 
U.S. government -- were the actual proximate cause of the deaths.  This 
deceptive practice was documented in this fact-intensive report [5] -- entitled: 
  "Medical Investigations of Homicides of Prisoners of War in Iraq and 
Afghanistan" -- by Steven H. Miles, Professor of Medicine and Bioethics at the 
University of Minnesota:

     It is probably inevitable that some prisoners who reportedly die of 
"natural causes" in truth died of homicide. However, the nature of Armed Forces' 
medical investigations made this kind of error more likely. The AFME reported 
homicide as the cause of death in 10 of the 23 death certificates released in 
May 2004. The death of Mohamed Taiq Zaid was initially attributed to "heat"; it 
is currently and belatedly being investigated as a possible homicide due to 
abusive exposure to the hot Iraqi climate and deprivation of water.

     Eight prisoners suffered "natural" deaths from heart attacks or 
atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease. Threats, beatings, fear, police 
interrogation, and arrests are known to cause "homicide by heart attack" or 
life-threatening heart failure. People with preexisting heart disease, 
dehydration, hyperthermia, or exhaustion are especially susceptible.[11-15] No 
forensic investigation of lethal "heart attacks" explores the possibility that 
these men died of stress-induced heart attacks. There are a number of reports of 
"heart attack" following harsh procedures in rounding up noncombatants in Iraq 
and Afghanistan.

     A typically sketchy US Army report says, "Detainee Death during weekend 
combat .... Army led raid this past weekend of a house in Iraq ... an Iraqi who 
was detained and zip-locked (flexi-cuffed with plastic bands tying his wrists 
together) died while in custody. Preliminary information is that the detainee 
died from an apparent heart attack.[16]" Sher Mohammad Khan was picked up in 
Afghanistan in September 2004. Shortly thereafter, his bruised body was given to 
his family. Military officials told journalists that he had died of a heart 
attack within hours of being taken into custody. No investigation, autopsy, or 
death certificate is available.[17]

Or consider this:

     Adbul Kareen Abdura Lafta (also known as Abu Malik Kenami) was admitted to 
Mosul prison on December 5, 2003 and died 4 days later.[20,21] The short, 
stocky, 44-year-old man weighed 175 pounds. He was never given a medical 
examination, and there is no medical record. After interrogation, a sandbag was 
put over his head. When he tried to remove it, guards made him jump up and down 
for 20 minutes with his wrists tied in front of him and then 20 minutes more 
with his wrists bound behind his back with a plastic binder. The bound and 
head-bagged man was put to bed. He was restless and "jibbering in Arabic." The 
guards told him to be quiet.

     The next morning, he was found dead. The body had "bloodshot" eyes, 
lacerations on his wrists from the plastic ties, unexplained bruises on his 
abdomen, and a fresh, bruised laceration on the back of his head. US Army 
investigators noted that the body did not have defensive bruises on his arms, an 
odd notation given that a man cannot raise bound arms in defense. No autopsy was 
performed. The death certificate lists the cause of death as unknown. It seems 
likely that Mr. Kenami died of positional asphyxia because of how he was 
restrained, hooded, and positioned. Positional asphyxia looks just like death by 
a natural heart attack except for those telltale conjunctival hemorrhages in his 
eyes.

There are countless other episodes like this of human beings in American custody 
dying because of the mistreatment -- authorized by Bush, Rumsfeld and others -- 
to which we subjected them.  These are murders and war crimes in every sense of 
the word.  That the highest level Bush officials and the President himself are 
responsible for the policies that spawned these crimes against humanity have 
been long known to anyone paying minimal attention, but now we have a bipartisan 
Senate Report -- signed by the presidential nominee of Bush's own political 
party -- that directly assigns culpability for these war crimes to the President 
and his policies.  It's nothing less than a formal declaration from the Senate 
that the President and his top aides are war criminals.

* * * * *

This Report was issued on Thursday.  Not a single mention was made of it on any 
of the Sunday news talk shows, with the sole exception being when John McCain 
told George Stephanopoulos that it was "not his job" to opine on whether 
criminal prosecutions were warranted for the Bush officials whose policies led 
to these crimes.  What really matters, explained McCain, was not that we get 
caught up in the past, but instead, that we ensure this never happens again -- 
yet, like everyone else who makes this argument, he offered no explanation as to 
how we could possibly ensure that "it never happens again" if we simultaneously 
announce that our political leaders will be immunized, not prosecuted, when they 
commit war crimes.  Doesn't that mindset, rather obviously, substantially 
increase the likelihood -- if not render inevitable -- that such behavior will 
occur again?  Other than that brief exchange, this Senate Report was a 
non-entity on the Sunday shows.

Instead, TV pundits were consumed with righteous anger over the petty, 
titillating, sleazy Rod Blagojevich scandal, competing with one another over who 
could spew the most derision and scorn for this pitiful, lowly, broken 
individual and his brazen though relatively inconsequential crimes.  Every 
exciting detail was voyeuristically and meticulously dissected by political 
pundits -- many, if not most, of whom have never bothered to acquaint themselves 
with any of the basic facts surrounding the monumental Bush lawbreaking and war 
crimes scandals.  TV "journalists" who have never even heard of the Taguba 
report -- the incredible indictment issued by a former U.S. General, who 
subsequently observed [6]:  "there is no longer any doubt as to whether the 
current administration has committed war crimes.  The only question that remains 
to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to 
account" -- spent the weekend opining on the intricacies of Blogojevich's hair 
and terribly upsetting propensity to use curse words.

The auction conducted by Blagojevich was just a slightly more flamboyant, vulgar 
and reckless expression of how our national political class conducts itself 
generally (are there really any fundamental differences between Blagojevich's 
conduct and Chuck Schumer's systematic, transparent influence-peddling and 
vote-selling to Wall Street donors, as documented by this excellent and highly 
incriminating New York Times piece [7] from Sunday -- "A Champion of Wall St. 
Reaps the Benefits")?  But Blagojevich is an impotent figure, stripped of all 
power, a national joke.  And attacking and condemning him is thus cheap and 
easy.  It threatens nobody in power.  To the contrary, his downfall is 
deceptively and usefully held up as an extreme aberration -- proof that 
government officials are held accountable when they break the law.

The media fixation on the ultimately irrelevant Blagojevich scandal, juxtaposed 
with their steadfast ignoring of the Senate report documenting systematic U.S. 
war crimes, is perfectly reflective of how our political establishment thinks. 
Blagojevich's laughable scheme is transformed into a national fixation and made 
into the target of collective hate sessions, while the systematic, ongoing sale 
of the legislative process to corporations and their lobbyists are overlooked as 
the normal course of business.  Lynndie England is uniformly scorned and 
imprisoned while George Bush, Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld are headed off to 
lives of luxury, great wealth, respect, and immunity from the consequences for 
their far more serious crimes.  And the courageous and principled career Justice 
Department lawyer who blew the whistle on Bush's illegal spying programs -- 
Thomas Tamm [8] -- continues to have his life destroyed, while the countless 
high-level government officials, lawyers and judges who also knew about it and 
did nothing about it are rewarded and honored, and those who committed the 
actual crimes are protected and immunized.

Just ponder the uproar if, in any other country, the political parties joined 
together and issued a report documenting that the country's President and 
highest aides were directly responsible for war crimes and widespread detainee 
abuse and death.  Compare the inevitable reaction to such an event if it 
happened in another country to what happens in the U.S. when such an event 
occurs -- a virtual media blackout, ongoing fixations by political journalists 
with petty scandals, and an undisturbed consensus that, no matter what else is 
true, high-level American political figures (as opposed to powerless low-level 
functionaries) must never be held accountable for their crimes.

UPDATE:  Here -- from July of this year -- is one of the more remarkable quotes 
of the Bush era; it's from Nancy Pelosi, who was explicitly briefed on the CIA's 
torture program in 2002:

     Q:  You’ve ruled against impeaching George Bush and Dick Cheney, and now 
Kucinich is trying to pass that. Why do you insist on not impeaching these 
people, so that the world and America can really see the crimes that they’ve 
committed?

     PELOSI: I thought that impeachment would be divisive for the country. . . . 
If somebody had a crime that the President had committed, that would be a 
different story.

It's not like there's any evidence that Bush committed any crimes or anything, 
said Pelosi.  From Jane Mayer's The Dark Side (h/t Hume's Ghost):

     One year of the Afghan prison operation alone cost an estimated 100 
million, which Congress hid in a classified annex of the first supplemental 
Afghan appropriation bill in 2002. Among the services that U.S. taxpayers 
unwittingly paid for were medieval-like dungeons, including a reviled former 
brick factory outside of Kabul known as "The Salt Pit." In 2004, a 
still-unidentified prisoner froze to death there after a young CIA supervisor 
ordered guards to strip him naked and chain him overnight to the concrete floor. 
The CIA has never accounted for the death, nor publicly reprimanded the 
supervisor. Instead, the Agency reportedly promoted him.

Those Blagojevich tapes sure are disgusting, aren't they?  Let's study those 
some more.

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/12/15/rumsfeld/