Prisoners of WAR --- POW'S

 

1. Defying the Geneva Convention Treaty, the Supreme Court

 

<Eggy note; The Geneva Convention was a necessary treaty to end all forms of prisoner abuse. It was an humanitarian agreement which each side must follow. Once broken of course, all forms of torture and abuse would follow. Unfortunately, Mr. Bush authorized torture and abuse thus our troops are now victims of Mr. Bush's irresponsible decision.>

 

1. Guantanamo Farce The Los Angeles Times | Editorial

2. No Accountability on Abu Ghraib

Thursday 02 September 2004

The Bush administration is ignoring, if not defying outright, the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling that all terror suspects must be able to challenge their imprisonment. The opening round of detainee military tribunals at Guantanamo Bay last week resembled something between a Mel Brooks farce and the kangaroo courts of former Ugandan dictator Idi Amin. Maybe Captain Kangaroo courts. The proceedings didn't look anything like justice, military or otherwise. Meanwhile, two U.S. citizens still sit in military brigs, isolated from their lawyers and months if not years away from the hearings the high court says they deserve.

The U.S. criminal justice system, including its military stepchild, is supposed to stand for due process, impartiality and openness. These are the same principles, after all, that U.S. troops are fighting - and dying - to seed in Iraq and Afghanistan. But the slapdash preliminary hearings for the first four of some 600 Guantanamo detainees violated basic tenets of fairness.

The tribunals are an ad hoc invention, authorized by President Bush three years ago when he rejected the established military court-martial system and the federal criminal courts, either of which would have worked more smoothly. As a result, military officials have few precedents to follow and last week seemed confused about which rules or legal procedures applied.

Members of these tribunals - the jury, in effect - are military professionals appointed by the Pentagon. The tribunal's chief officer is a retired Army judge, the only member of the panel with legal training. He is both the judge and a jury member, ruling on motions and voting with the five other commissioners.

In a criminal court, the lay jury decides the facts and the judge rules on questions of law. Here, however, tribunal members decide on both. Yet the five nonlawyers were clearly befuddled last week when asked to define concepts such as due process and reasonable doubt.

The cards are stacked against detainees in other ways too. Government prosecutors got spacious quarters and their own staff to prepare for the hearings. Military defense lawyers were crowded into one room. Midway through the week, the conference table they all shared was removed. The Arab interpreters were so incompetent that the proceedings resembled a game of "telephone," in which the message veered closer to gibberish with each repetition. Yet this game is about men's futures.

Given the confusion, officials must feel justified in limiting reporters to pen and paper, which might as well be quill and parchment. No photographic, video or audio recordings of the hearings will ever be released. From the government's perspective, perhaps the less that Americans know of these bumbling proceedings, the less they'll care.

The two U.S. citizens that Bush has labeled as enemy combatants, Yaser Hamdi and Jose Padilla, haven't gotten even this much. Years after their arrests, each remains in a military brig, often in solitary confinement. Even after the Supreme Court's declaration that they have a right to a hearing, government lawyers outrageously are fighting every lower court petition filed by lawyers retained by the men's families. And still the government has filed no charges against Hamdi or Padilla.

The Supreme Court made itself clear in its June rulings: Terror suspects are entitled to at least bare-bones due process. For government lawyers to insist otherwise is unprecedented. Their assertion probably doesn't scare terrorists, but it throws a pall on the lush praise for U.S. freedoms that decorate the Republican National Convention.

http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/090304E.shtml

 

 

 

 

No Accountability on Abu Ghraib

NYTIMES.COM, September 10, 2004

 

 

After months of Senate hearings and eight Pentagon investigations, it is obvious that the administration does not intend to hold any high-ranking official accountable for the nightmare at Abu Ghraib. It was pretty clear yesterday that Senator John Warner's well-intentioned hearings of the Armed Services Committee are not going to do it either.

 

James Schlesinger, who was picked by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to head a civilian investigation of Abu Ghraib and seems determined to repay the favor, gave unhelpful testimony that included an incredible statement that there was no policy "that encourages abuse." He told that to the same senators who had heard earlier from a panel of generals that the Central Intelligence Agency was still refusing to account for its practice of hiding dozens of prisoners from the Red Cross. Mr. Rumsfeld personally approved that violation of the Geneva Conventions and other international treaties on at least one occasion.

 

At the hearing, Mr. Warner asked Mr. Schlesinger and Harold Brown, another former secretary of defense, to be specific about their report's talk of "institutional and personal responsibility at higher levels." Neither man had any intention of doing that.

 

Senator John McCain, who was a prisoner of war in the Vietnam era, asked Mr. Schlesinger with evident exasperation: "Isn't there some accountability? Isn't there some responsibility?" Mr. Schlesinger managed to come up with the colonel who read the first Red Cross report on the abuse of prisoners in late 2003 and decided that it was not credible. As for high-ranking officers and civilians, he intoned, "careers will be negatively affected."

 

Senator Edward Kennedy tried again. He read a list of naval officers fired for minor infractions committed by those under their command and asked why the same high standards of responsibility should not apply to, say, Mr. Rumsfeld. Mr. Schlesinger, who had earlier offered the bizarre theory that "what constitutes 'humane treatment' lies in the eye of the beholder," replied that "it's more complicated" when it came to holding a high-ranking politician accountable. He said a man like Mr. Rumsfeld must be judged on his "full performance."

 

We agree, enthusiastically. And with due respect to Mr. Warner - who has bravely continued his hearings and seems willing to keep going for months more - the answers are in.

 

Mr. Rumsfeld gave President Bush the legal advice that led to the president's famous memo declaring that the United States could, at his discretion, suspend the Geneva Conventions in the "global war on terror," and that prisoners with the newly minted designation of "unlawful combatants" were not entitled to the conventions' protections. Mr. Rumsfeld authorized the use of brutal interrogation techniques at the prison in Guantánamo Bay, some of which he later rescinded. His war plans left the Army without enough forces to face the uprising that followed Mr. Bush's ludicrously premature "mission accomplished" photo-op. Those policies - which commanders were afraid to challenge - left 97 untrained military police guarding some 7,000 Iraqis at Abu Ghraib who were not considered prisoners of war.

 

Mr. Rumsfeld's staff sent the chief Guantánamo Bay jailer to Iraq. There, he gave Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, who was under immense pressure from Washington to get intelligence on the Iraqi insurgency, a rundown on how the military forced information out of prisoners at Guantánamo. General Sanchez used that briefing, and the logic of the president's memo on unlawful combatants, to authorize the use of dogs and other illegal interrogation methods. He later tried to rescind the order, but every investigation has shown that the notion that the rules had changed was already widespread in Iraq, as well as at American military prisons in Afghanistan.

 

Most broadly, Mr. Rumsfeld, along with Attorney General John Ashcroft, has led the administration's efforts to justify the use of brutal interrogation techniques in the name of fighting terrorism.

 

Late in the day of hearings, Senator Lindsey Graham, a Republican, offered a wry observation on how Mr. Rumsfeld's future had become wrapped up in Mr. Bush's campaign. "I guess we'll get the real answer to that after the election," he said.

 

Perhaps so, but that will be a year after the Red Cross first told the Army that prisoners were being brutalized at military detention centers all over Iraq, especially at Abu Ghraib. The American public, and the rest of the world, should not have to wait that long.