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Today's Top News
General Who Probed Abu Ghraib Says Bush Officials Committed War Crimes
WASHINGTON - The Army general who led the investigation into prisoner abuse at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison accused the Bush administration Wednesday of committing "war crimes" and called for those responsible to be held to account.
The remarks by Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba, who's now retired, came in a new report that found that U.S. personnel tortured and abused detainees in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, using beatings, electrical shocks, sexual humiliation and other cruel practices.
"After years of disclosures by government investigations, media accounts and reports from human rights organizations, there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes," Taguba wrote. "The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account."
Taguba, whose 2004 investigation documented chilling abuses at Abu Ghraib, is thought to be the most senior official to have accused the administration of war crimes. "The commander in chief and those under him authorized a systematic regime of torture," he wrote.
A White House spokeswoman, Kate Starr, had no comment.
Taguba didn't respond to a request for further comment relayed via a spokesman.
The group Physicians for Human Rights, which compiled the new report, described it as the most in-depth medical and psychological examination of former detainees to date.
Doctors and mental health experts examined 11 detainees held for long periods in the prison system that President Bush established after the 9-11 terrorist attacks. All of them eventually were released without charges.
The doctors and experts determined that the men had been subject to cruelties that ranged from isolation, sleep deprivation and hooding to electric shocks, beating and, in one case, being forced to drink urine.
Bush has said repeatedly that the United States doesn't condone torture.
"All credible allegations of abuse are thoroughly investigated and, if substantiated, those responsible are held accountable," said Navy Cmdr. J.D. Gordon, a Pentagon spokesman. The Defense Department responds to concerns raised by the International Committee for the Red Cross, he said, which has access to detainees under military control.
"It adds little to the public discourse to draw sweeping conclusions based upon dubious allegations regarding remote medical assessments of former detainees, now far removed from detention," Gordon said.
The physicians' group said that its experts, who had experience studying torture's effects, spent two days with each former captive and conducted intensive exams and interviews. They administered tests to detect exaggeration. In two of the 11 cases, the group was able to review medical records.
The report, "Broken Laws, Broken Lives," concurs with a five-part McClatchy investigation of Guantanamo published this week. Among its findings were that abuses occurred - primarily at prisons in Afghanistan where detainees were held en route to Guantanamo - and that many of the prisoners were wrongly detained.
Also this week, a probe by the Senate Armed Services Committee revealed how senior Pentagon officials pushed for harsher interrogation methods over the objections of top military lawyers. Those methods later surfaced in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld didn't specifically approve of the worst abuses, but neither he nor the White House enforced strict limits on how detainees would be treated.
There was no "bright line of abuse which could not be transgressed," former Navy general counsel Alberto Mora told the Senate committee.
Leonard Rubenstein, the president of Physicians for Human Rights, said there was a direct connection between the Pentagon decisions and the abuses his group uncovered. "The result was a horrific stew of pain, degradation and ... suffering," he said.
Detainee abuse has been documented previously, in photos from Abu Ghraib, accounts by former detainees and their lawyers and a confidential report by the International Committee for the Red Cross that was leaked to the U.S. news media.
Of the 11 men evaluated in the Physicians for Human Rights report, four were detained in Afghanistan between late 2001 and early 2003, and later sent to Guantanamo. The remaining seven were detained in Iraq in 2003.
One of the Iraqis, identified by the pseudonym Laith, was arrested with his family at his Baghdad home in the early morning of Oct. 19, 2003. He was taken to a location where he was beaten, stripped to his underwear and threatened with execution, the report says.
"Laith" told the examiners he was then taken to a second site, where he was photographed in humiliating positions and given electric shocks to his genitals.
Finally, he was taken to Abu Ghraib, where he spent the first 35 to 40 days in isolation in a small cage, enduring being suspended in the cage and other "stress positions."
He was released on June 24, 2004, without charge.
On The Web: The Physicians for Human Rights report. McClatchy's investigation of Guantanamo Bay detainees.
© 2008 McClatchy Newspapers
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14 Comments so far
Show All"The commander in chief and those under him authorized a systematic regime of torture,"
Well this is still information that didn't make it into my hometown newspaper (republican voicebox if there ever was one) but it made it to CNN.
Info any of us have known for years now if we read CD and other sites FINALLY getting some play by MSM.
Will it ever get "loud" enough to wake the sleeping Rip Van Winkle's of the American people?
Outrage? We need some.
"General Who Probed Abu Ghraib Says Bush Officials Committed War Crimes"
---guess what.
that's what the entire world is saying.
welcome to now.
Dont the countries of the world have an obligation to arrest those suspected of War Crimes, and hold them for trial?
Where is Bush today? What scrotumless country is allowing a suspected War Criminal to wander their streets unmolested this afternoon?
Free Lynndie England, Charles Graber and put Bu$h and uncle Dick in prison.
"We recognize that to plan warfare is the business of professional soldiers in all countries. But it is one thing to plan strategic moves in the event war comes, and it is another thing to plot and intrigue to bring on that war. We will prove the leaders of the German General Staff and of the High Command to have been guilty of just that. Military men are not before you because they served their country. They are here because they mastered it, along with these others, and drove it to war. They are not here because they lost the war, but because they started it. Politicians may have thought of them as soldiers, but soldiers know they were politicians. We ask that the General Staff and the High Command, as defined in the Indictment, be condemned as a criminal group whose existence and tradition constitute a standing menace to the peace of the world."
U.S. prosecutor Robert Jackson
Nuremberg
11/22/1945
This stunning bombshell of a news story becomes more compelling as each day passes!
But try googling "Taguba War Crimes". Aside from obscure blog articles on the newpapers web sites - nothing of this story appeared on the US print media today or yeaterday.
Cannot find this yet on MSM.
We live in a "Jerry Springer Society". The only one person at my job I can talk politics with is a psychologist who is on the side of Bush. Everyone else at work is either not interested in what's going on outside their own little community or they don't care. And I find it sad and hard to believe that a person who is well-educated and who works in a humanitarian kind of job could actually be pro-Bush and Bush doctrines.
All of this makes me extremely depressed. I mean depressed to the point that I am taking anti-depressants because of it. Have the events of the past 8 years affected anyone else out there as bad as that? What can we do to get people interested in the fact that if we don't do something to change our society, we are all soon going to hell in a handbasket?
Sometimes I feel that I might be better off if I just gave up and became like everyone else. A robot with no feelings and no brains.
The United States is the largest sovereign supporter - through funding, harboring, and training - of terrorism in the world today.
The forefathers of this nation, those with portraits displayed throughout Washington D.C., would rise against the tyranny that exists here within a fortnight.
Demand that ethics be taught in our elementary and high schools. Bring back a respect for justice, and give our children the knowledge with which to perceive the evils in our society.
Lyndie England is free. She came home, here, to Mineral County, WV over a year ago.
I read an article by a Psychiatrist last year that fought the, sorry not a Doc, whatever their equivalent of the AMA is and was screwed over real good by her fellow Shrinks, she refused to be a silent observer of humans being tortured for the sake of her medicine or science whatever. I cannot even recall what she does now, I do believe she is still involved in the mental health field, to what degree I don't know.
Hi Pets, yes I do take antidepressants. Prozac was a miracle drug for me and I've been on it since it came out. I know that most of my problem is brain chemistry, but it doesn't help that the scum of the earth make the rules for everybody else to follow.
Its always been that way, but it has never been this bad. Nixon pretended to care whether anybody believed his lies. This whole neocon crowd harbors an arrogance which makes them immune to world opinion.
Being able to do what you believe in regardless of the opinions of others is a rare and admirable possession, but I can't understand these Bushies. I can't imagine what they must be thinking. There are times when I am sure that they and I do not belong to the same species.
Anti-depressants like Prozac are part of the problem, not part of the solution. As politically progressive people, or progressive-populists, we're like Jews, Slavs, gypsies, homosexuals, blacks, avante-garde artists, intellectuals or socialists living in 1930s Germany. And that's not to even mention the outspoken, those with "official" mental illnesses and the "cripples" or just plain old decent people who opposed corporatism and media manipulation.