Months before the worldwide condemnation of the treatment of the Abu Ghraib prisoners, Rumsfeld sent Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller to Baghdad from Guantanamo Bay to “hit back at the [Iraqi] insurgents … through unorthodox means,” according to a May 10, 2004, front-page story in the Washington Post.

“He came up there and told me he was going to ‘Gitmoize’ the detention operation,” turning it into a hub of interrogation, said Brig. Gen. Janis L. Karpinski, then commander of the military prison system in Iraq, according to the Post.

Hersh wrote in The New Yorker’s May 24, 2004, issue that “the roots of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal lie not in the criminal inclinations of a few Army reservists but in a decision, approved last year [2003] by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, to expand a highly secret operation, which had been focused on the hunt for Al Qaeda, to the interrogation of prisoners in Iraq….

“The solution, endorsed by Rumsfeld and carried out by Stephen Cambone, was to get tough with those Iraqis in the Army prison system who were suspected of being insurgents…. Rumsfeld and Cambone went a step further, [bringing] unconventional methods to Abu Ghraib…. The male prisoners could be treated roughly, and exposed to sexual humiliation.”

Tarnished Image

Amrit Singh, a staff attorney at the ACLU’s Immigrant Rights Project and the co-author of “Administration of Torture,” added that Rumsfeld and other top Bush administration officials by “holding up the Geneva Convention and saying it did not apply to some prisoners have tarnished the image of the US throughout the world.”

Even after the programs governing interrogations were exposed, Rumsfeld made sure that a loophole in a new Defense Department (DoD) policy issued in November 2005, which barred torture and called for the “humane” treatment of detainees, gave him and his deputy the authority to override it.

“Intelligence interrogations will be conducted in accordance with applicable law, this directive and implementing plans, policies, orders, directives, and doctrine developed by DoD components and approved by USD (I), unless otherwise authorized, in writing, by the secretary of defense or deputy secretary of defense,” the policy says. “USD (I)” refers to the undersecretary of defense for intelligence.

Hypocrisy Exposed

It would take months and years – as documents from Bush’s first term were gradually released to the public – to reveal the extent of the Bush administration’s hypocrisy.

For instance, it’s now known that the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) began an investigation of US war crimes in Iraq from the first days of the invasion, interviewing Iraqis captives from March to November 2003.

On January 15, 2004, ICRC president Jakob Kellenberger expressed his concern to Secretary of State Colin Powell about the Bush administration’s attitude regarding international law, specifically an op-ed by then-State Department legal adviser William Taft IV in The Financial Times four days earlier.

In that op-ed, Taft wrote that there was no law that required the US to afford due process to foreigners captured in the “war on terror.”

“American treatment of detainees held at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba is fully consistent with international law and with centuries-old norms for treating individuals captured in wartime,” Taft wrote. “We are engaged in a war.”

It’s unclear what Kellenberger cited in Taft’s column, because the recently released minutes of the meeting were heavily redacted. But the conversation segued into Powell asking Kellenberger “where in addition to Afghanistan, did ICRC have problems with notification and access to detainees?”

Powell is quoted as saying “we are confident of our legal position [referring to legal adviser Taft’s op-ed], but we also know the world is watching us.”

The next month, the ICRC gave Bush administration officials a confidential report, which found that US occupation forces in Iraq often arrested Iraqis without good reason and subjected them to abuse and humiliation that sometimes was “tantamount to torture” in violation of the Geneva Conventions.

Some excessive violence, including the use of live ammunition against detainees, had led to seven deaths, the ICRC report said.

“According to the allegations collected by the ICRC, ill-treatment during interrogation was not systematic, except with regard to persons arrested in connection with suspected security offences or deemed to have an ‘intelligence’ value,” the report said.

“In these cases, persons deprived of their liberty under supervision of the Military Intelligence were at high risk of being subjected to a variety of harsh treatments ranging from insults, threats and humiliations to both physical and psychological coercion, which in some cases was tantamount to torture, in order to force cooperation with their interrogators.”

 Save as PDF