Abu Ghraib, Unresolved
Published: October 28, 2004

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/28/opinion/28thu1.html

When the Abu Ghraib prison scandal first broke, the
Bush administration struck a pose of righteous
indignation. It assured the world that the problem was
limited to one block of one prison, that the United
States would never condone the atrocities we saw in
those terrible photos, that it would punish those
responsible for any abuse - regardless of their rank -
and that it was committed to defending the Geneva
Conventions and the rights of prisoners.

None of this appears to be true. The Army has
prosecuted a few low-ranking soldiers and rebuked a
Reserve officer or two, but exonerated the top
generals. No political leader is being held
accountable for the policies set in Washington that
led to the abuses at Abu Ghraib and at other prison
camps operated by the Pentagon and the Central
Intelligence Agency in Iraq and Afghanistan, and at
Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, where prisoner abuse was
systemic. And we've learned that the administration's
respect for the Geneva Conventions, which some senior
officials openly disdain as an antiquated nuisance, is
highly conditional.

The Times's Tim Golden documented this week the way
the Bush administration secretly created a parallel -
and unconstitutional - judicial universe for Gitmo.
The White House was so determined to suspend the
normal rights and processes for the hundreds of men
captured in Afghanistan - none of them important
members of Al Qaeda and most of them no threat at all
- that it hid the details from Secretary of State
Colin Powell and never bothered to consult Congress.

The Washington Post and The Times also reported this
week that over 18 months, the C.I.A., which has a
record of hiding prisoners in Iraq from the Red Cross,
secretly spirited a dozen non-Iraqi civilians out of
prisons in Iraq to undisclosed locations - another
evident violation of the Geneva Conventions. To
justify that operation after the fact, the same legal
offices that produced the infamous paper on how to
pretend that torture is legal drew up a new opinion
claiming that the president has the right to decide
which prisoners are covered by the Geneva Conventions
and which are not.

This happened in secret, at the same time that
administration officials were testifying at the
Senate's Abu Ghraib hearings about the president's
allegiance to the Geneva Conventions and to American
constitutional values when it came to the treatment of
prisoners.

The gap between the administration's public statements
and private actions is enormous. In May, Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said civilians captured in
Iraq would be treated according to the conventions.
And Stephen Cambone, Mr. Rumsfeld's under secretary
for intelligence, gave at best a misleading answer
when he testified under oath that it was his "guess"
that President Bush would take the issue under
advisement should it ever come up. Not only had it
come up, but the decision had already been made to
deny the protections of the Geneva Conventions to
certain prisoners.

This issue has barely been discussed by Mr. Bush or
Senator John Kerry, but the country needs answers and
public accountability. If Senator Kerry wins next
week, we hope that he will make this an early
priority. If Mr. Bush wins, it will be up to Congress
to meet its oversight responsibility. So far, its
record is not good. The House has done nothing on Abu
Ghraib and related issues. Senator John Warner,
chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, tried
to investigate Abu Ghraib despite White House
stonewalling. Mr. Warner lost his nerve as the
election approached, but we hope he'll get it back
next year.






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