The behind-the-scenes dispute over detainee treatment went public in another way in April 2004 when photos were leaked showing U.S. prison guards at Abu Ghraib forcing naked Iraqi detainees into fake sexual positions, intimidating detainees with attacks dogs, committing other abuses, and posing with the corpse of an Iraqi who had died in custody.
After a public scandal erupted, President Bush blamed the Abu Ghraib abuses on low-level prison guards.
“I shared a deep disgust that those prisoners were treated the way they were treated,” Bush said. “Their treatment does not reflect the nature of the American people.”
However, Bush’s finger-pointing at a few “bad apples” was soon contradicted when the contents of the February 2004 ICRC report were leaked to the Wall Street Journal in May 2004. The ICRC findings made clear that the Abu Ghraib abuses were not an isolated case.
Nevertheless, 11 enlisted soldiers, who were guards at Abu Ghraib, were convicted in courts martial. Cpl. Charles Graner Jr. received the harshest sentence – 10 years in prison – while Lynndie England, a 22-year-old single mother who was photographed holding an Iraqi on a leash and pointing at a detainee’s penis, was sentenced to three years in prison.
Superior officers were cleared of wrongdoing or received mild reprimands.
But the February 2004 ICRC report on Iraq took on added meaning with the recent disclosure of another ICRC report, dated Feb. 14, 2007. Based on interviews that the ICRC finally arranged with 14 “high-value” detainees held at secret CIA prisons, the report concluded those prisoners had been subjected to similar humiliating and abusive treatment, including forced nudity and stress positions, as well as the drowning sensation of waterboarding.
The ICRC concluded that the treatment “constituted torture,” a finding that has legal weight because the ICRC is responsible for ensuring compliance with the Geneva Conventions and supervising the treatment of prisoners of war.
Taken together, the two reports suggest that the Bush administration adopted a policy of torture against “high-value” detainees captured in 2002 and that the policy spread to Iraq in 2003 when U.S. forces were grappling with a rising Iraqi insurgency against the American occupation.
In December 2008, a Senate Armed Services Committee report reached a similar conclusion, tracing the U.S. abuse of detainees at Guantanamo Bay and later Abu Ghraib to President Bush’s Feb. 7, 2002, action memorandum that excluded “war on terror” suspects from Geneva Convention protections.
The report said Bush’s memo opened the door to “considering aggressive techniques,” which were then developed with the complicity of then-Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, Bush’s National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and other senior officials.
The public record – as it now exists – also makes clear that the Bush administration had a selective view of international law. When it worked to American advantage – as when Iraqis videotaped captured U.S. soldiers in March 2003 – Bush and his aides saw the rules as binding, but not when the laws of war constrained their own behavior.
In other words, international law applied to the other guy, but not to George W. Bush. He surely didn’t mean to implicate himself when he declared “the people who mistreat the prisoners will be treated as war criminals."
Originally published at ConsortiumNews.com
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