Patterns Of Abuse

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Patterns Of Abuse

Editorial
NY Times
May 23, 2005

President Bush said the other day that the world should see his administration's handling of the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison as a model of transparency and accountability. He said those responsible were being systematically punished, regardless of rank. It made for a nice Oval Office photo-op on a Friday morning. Unfortunately, none of it is true.

The administration has provided nothing remotely like a full and honest accounting of the extent of the abuses at American prison camps in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. It has withheld internal reports and stonewalled external inquiries, while clinging to the fiction that the abuse was confined to isolated acts, like the sadistic behavior of one night crew in one cellblock at Abu Ghraib. The administration has prevented any serious investigation of policy makers at the White House, the Justice Department and the Pentagon by orchestrating official probes so that none could come
even close to the central question of how the prison policies were formulated and how they led to the abuses.

But a two-part series in The Times by Tim Golden provides a horrifying new confirmation that what happened at Abu Ghraib was no aberration, but part of a widespread pattern. It showed the tragic impact of the initial decision by Mr. Bush and his top advisers that they were not going to follow the Geneva Conventions, or indeed American law, for prisoners taken in antiterrorist operations.

The series details the killing of two Afghan prisoners at the Bagram prison camp, one of them an innocent taxi driver who was tormented to death by American soldiers. The investigative file on Bagram, obtained by The Times, showed that the mistreatment of prisoners was routine: shackling them to the ceilings of their cells, depriving them of sleep, kicking and hitting them, sexually humiliating them and threatening them with guard dogs - the very same behavior later repeated in Iraq.

This pattern should not surprise anyone by now. The same general who organized the harsh interrogation techniques at Guantánamo Bay was later sent to Iraq, as were some of the prison guard units from Bagram. Guards at the Iraq and Afghanistan prisons were sent to their duties from civilian life, with no experience and little training.

One thing they were taught at Bagram was the "common peroneal strike" - a blow to the side of the leg just above the knee that can cause severe damage. It is clearly out of bounds for a civilized army, but it was used at Bagram routinely. The taxi driver, Dilawar, died after "blunt force injuries to the lower extremities" stopped his heart, according to the autopsy report.

The trouble is, normal bounds did not apply at Bagram, because the president had muddied the water with conflicting orders. In a February 2002 memo, he spoke of giving prisoners humane treatment, but only when it suited "military necessity," and he also said members of Al Qaeda and the Taliban were not entitled to prisoner-of-war status. That led interrogators to believe that they "could deviate slightly from the rules," according to an Army Reserve sergeant who served at Bagram.

It now appears that those slight deviations included killing prisoners, and then covering up the reason they died.

© 2005 NY Times, Inc.