War Crimes?

This past Friday, a bipartisan Senate report named Secretary Rumsfeld and other top officials directly responsible for sanctioning torture (see the article below). Now, rumors are that Bush will pardon Rumsfeld and others for these abuses. Amnesty International is advocating for a letter-writing campaign to local newspapers protesting any possible pardon of accused war criminals. Click here to learn more about the campaign and how you can easily write a letter that will bring awareness of the issue to your local community.

Report on Detainee Abuse Blames Top Bush Officials
(Washington Post: December 12, 2008)
by Joby Warrick and Karen DeYoung
For the full article, click here. Here are some excerpts:

A bipartisan panel of senators has concluded that former defense secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and other top Bush administration officials bear direct responsibility for the harsh treatment of detainees at Guantanamo Bay, and that their decisions led to more serious abuses in Iraq and elsewhere.

In the most comprehensive critique by Congress of the military's interrogation practices, the Senate Armed Services Committee issued a report yesterday that accuses Rumsfeld and his deputies of being the authors and chief promoters of harsh interrogation policies that disgraced the nation and undermined U.S. security. The report, released by Sens. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.), contends that Pentagon officials later tried to create a false impression that the policies were unrelated to acts of detainee abuse committed by members of the military.

The full report was unanimously approved by the committee late last month and sent to the Pentagon with no dissenting views, Levin said in an interview. Although much of the information has previously been made public, there are references to still-classified memos, including an Aug. 1, 2002, report to the CIA by then-Assistant Attorney General Jay S. Bybee, who headed the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, evaluating the legality of specific interrogation techniques such as waterboarding.

Levin acknowledged that most of the senior officials named in the report have left government or soon will. "But I would hope that the new administration, as well as the Defense Department . . . would look for ways, where appropriate, to hold people accountable," he said.

In July 2002, Rumsfeld's senior staff began compiling information about techniques used in military survival schools to simulate conditions that U.S. airmen might face if captured by an enemy that did not follow the Geneva Conventions. Those techniques -- borrowed from a training program known as Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape, or SERE -- included waterboarding, or simulated drowning, and were loosely based on methods adopted by Chinese communists to coerce propaganda confessions from captured U.S. soldiers during the Korean War.

The SERE program became the template for interrogation methods that were ultimately approved by Rumsfeld himself. In the field, U.S. military interrogators used the techniques with little oversight and frequently abusive results, the panel found.

"It is particularly troubling that senior officials approved the use of interrogation techniques that were originally designed to simulate abusive tactics used by our enemies against our own soldiers," the report said, "and that were modeled, in part, on tactics used by the Communist Chinese to elicit false confessions from U.S. military personnel."

Human rights and constitutional law organizations have urged further action, ranging from an independent commission to prosecutions of those involved in authorizing the interrogations. Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, which has helped defend detainees at Guantanamo, said the committee report is valuable because "it's official, it's bipartisan."

"It's open and explicit, going right to Rumsfeld and having Rice involved," Ratner said. "It breaks new ground in saying that the SERE techniques basically don't work . . . that they're actually designed to elicit false confessions."

Our note:

As the Bush administration scrambles to push through numerous measures before January, the pressure is on Obama to work to restore confidence in the US government and military. In September, Feingold chaired a hearing in the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Constitution Subcommittee entitled “Restoring the Rule of Law.” The hearing featured testimony and recommendations from about forty historians, law professors and advocacy organizations, including the head of President-elect Obama’s transition team, John Podesta. Feingold provided a copy of the written record of the hearing to the President-elect.

The recommendations include:
Closing the facility at Guantanamo Bay – a step Obama has supported;
Banning torture and establishing a single, government-wide standard of humane detainee treatment;
Conducting a comprehensive review of Office of Legal Counsel opinions and repudiating or revising those that overstate executive authority;
Supporting significant legislative changes to the Patriot Act and the FISA Amendments Act;
Cooperating with congressional oversight, including providing full information to intelligence committees;
Establishing presumptions of openness and disclosure in making decisions on the classification of information and responding to requests under the Freedom of Information Act.

Feingold's open letter to Obama can be found here .