Putting the System on Trial
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H U M A N R I G H T S W A T C H R E P O R T :
" G E T T I N G A W A Y W I T H T O R T U R E ? " ' 3
"Getting Away with Torture?" is the provocative title of the Human Rights Watch
(HRW) report (April 2 0 0 5 ) , which stresses the need for a truly independent inves-
tigation of the many abuses, tortures, and murders of prisoners by U.S. military
and civilian personnel. It calls for an investigation of all those who were the archi-
tects of such policies that have led to wanton violations of human rights.
We can think of the torture dungeon at Abu Ghraib and similar facilities at
Gitmo and other military prisons in Afghanistan and Iraq as having been de-
signed by the senior "architects" Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Tenet. Next came
the "justifiers," the lawyers who came up with new language and concepts that
legalized "torture" in new ways and means—the president's legal counselors Al-
berto Gonzales, John You, Jay Bybee, William Taft, and John Ashcroft. The "fore-
men" on the torture construction job were the military leaders, such as Generals
Miller, Sanchez, Karpinski, and their underlings. Finally, came the technicians,
the grunts in charge of carrying out the daily labor of coercive interrogation,
abuse, and torture—the soldiers in military intelligence, CIA operatives, civilian
contract and military interrogators, translators, medics, and military police, in-
cluding Chip Frederick and his night shift buddies.
Shortly after the photographic revelations of abuses at Abu Ghraib, Presi-
dent Bush vowed that the "wrongdoers will be brought to j u s t i c e . "
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However, the
HRW report points out that only the lowly MPs were brought to justice and that
none of those who created the policies and provided the ideology and permission
for those abuses to take place ever were. "In the intervening months," the HRW
report concludes:
It has become clear that torture and abuse have taken place not solely at
Abu Ghraib but rather in dozens of detention facilities worldwide, that in
many cases the abuse resulted in death or severe trauma, and that a good
number of the victims were civilians with no connection to al-Qaeda or
terrorism. There is also evidence of abuse at controlled "secret locations"
abroad and of authorities sending suspects to third-country dungeons
around the world where torture was likely to occur. To date, however, the
only wrongdoers being brought to justice are those at the bottom of the
chain-of-command. The evidence demands more. Yet a wall of impunity
surrounds the architects of the policies responsible for the larger pattern
of abuses.
As this report shows, evidence is mounting that high-ranking civilian
and military leaders—including Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld,
former CIA Director George Tenet, Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, for-
merly the top commander in Iraq, and Major General Geoffrey Miller, the
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