Bush linked to detainee homicides; media yawns

Senate report links Bush to detainee homicides; media yawns
Glenn Greenwald
Monday Dec. 15, 2008
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/

The bipartisan Senate Armed Services Committee report issued on
Thursday -- which documents that "former Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld and other senior U.S. officials share much of the blame for
detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, and Guantanamo Bay,
Cuba" and "that Rumsfeld's actions were 'a direct cause of detainee
abuse' at Guantanamo and 'influenced and contributed to the use of
abusive techniques ... in Afghanistan and Iraq'" -- raises an obvious
and glaring question: how can it possibly be justified that the low-
level Army personnel carrying out these policies at Abu Ghraib have
been charged, convicted and imprisoned, while the high-level
political officials and lawyers who directed and authorized these
same policies remain free of any risk of prosecution? The
culpability which the Report assigns for these war crimes is vast in
scope and unambiguous:

The executive summary also traces the erosion of detainee treatment
standards to a Feb,. 7, 2002, memorandum signed by President George
W. Bush stating that the Geneva Convention did not apply to the U.S.
war with al Qaeda and that Taliban detainees were not entitled to
prisoner of war status or legal protections.
"The president's order closed off application of Common Article 3 of
the Geneva Conventions, which would have afforded minimum standards
for humane treatment," the summary said.
Members of Bush's Cabinet and other senior officials participated in
meetings inside the White House in 2002 and 2003 where specific
interrogation techniques were discussed, according to the report.

The policies which the Senate Armed Services Committee unanimously
concludes were authorized by Bush, Rumsfeld and several other top
Bush officials did not merely lead to "abuse" and humiliating
treatment, but are directly -- and unquestionably -- responsible for
numerous detainee murders. Many of those deaths caused by abusive
treatment have been formally characterized as "homicides" by
autopsies performed in Iraq and Afghanistan (see these chilling
compilations of autopsy findings on detainees in U.S. custody,
obtained by the ACLU, which reads like a classic and compelling
exhibit in a war crimes trial).
While the bulk of the attention over detainee abuse has been directed
to Guantanamo, the U.S., to this day, continues to imprison -- with
no charges -- thousands of Iraqi citizens. In Iraq an Afghanistan,
detainee deaths were rampant and, to this day, detainees continue to
die under extremely suspicious circumstances. Just yesterday, there
was yet another death of a very young Iraqi detainee whose death was
attributed to quite unlikely natural causes.

The U.S. military says a detainee has died of an apparent heart
attack while in custody at a U.S. detention facility in Baghdad.
Monday's statement says the 25-year-old man was pronounced dead by
doctors at a combat hospital after losing consciousness at Camp
Cropper. . . .
The U.S. military is holding thousands of prisoners at Camp Cropper
near the Baghdad airport and Camp Bucca in the southern desert.

For years, it has been common to attribute detainee deaths to "heart
attacks" where the evidence makes clear that abusive interrogation
techniques and other inhumane treatment -- the very policies
authorized at the highest levels of the U.S. government -- were the
actual proximate cause of the deaths. This deceptive practice was
documented in this fact-intensive report -- entitled: "Medical
Investigations of Homicides of Prisoners of War in Iraq and
Afghanistan" -- by Steven H. Miles, Professor of Medicine and
Bioethics at the University of Minnesota:

It is probably inevitable that some prisoners who reportedly die
of "natural causes" in truth died of homicide. However, the nature of
Armed Forces' medical investigations made this kind of error more
likely. The AFME reported homicide as the cause of death in 10 of the
23 death certificates released in May 2004. The death of Mohamed Taiq
Zaid was initially attributed to "heat"; it is currently and
belatedly being investigated as a possible homicide due to abusive
exposure to the hot Iraqi climate and deprivation of water.
Eight prisoners suffered "natural" deaths from heart attacks or
atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease. Threats, beatings, fear,
police interrogation, and arrests are known to cause "homicide by
heart attack" or life-threatening heart failure. People with
preexisting heart disease, dehydration, hyperthermia, or exhaustion
are especially susceptible.[11–15] No forensic investigation of
lethal "heart attacks" explores the possibility that these men died
of stress-induced heart attacks. There are a number of reports
of "heart attack" following harsh procedures in rounding up
noncombatants in Iraq and Afghanistan.
A typically sketchy US Army report says, "Detainee Death during
weekend combat …. Army led raid this past weekend of a house in Iraq
… an Iraqi who was detained and zip-locked (flexi-cuffed with plastic
bands tying his wrists together) died while in custody. Preliminary
information is that the detainee died from an apparent heart attack.
[16]" Sher Mohammad Khan was picked up in Afghanistan in September
2004. Shortly thereafter, his bruised body was given to his family.
Military officials told journalists that he had died of a heart
attack within hours of being taken into custody. No investigation,
autopsy, or death certificate is available.[17]

Or consider this:

Adbul Kareen Abdura Lafta (also known as Abu Malik Kenami) was
admitted to Mosul prison on December 5, 2003 and died 4 days later.
[20,21] The short, stocky, 44-year-old man weighed 175 pounds. He was
never given a medical examination, and there is no medical record.
After interrogation, a sandbag was put over his head. When he tried
to remove it, guards made him jump up and down for 20 minutes with
his wrists tied in front of him and then 20 minutes more with his
wrists bound behind his back with a plastic binder. The bound and
head-bagged man was put to bed. He was restless and "jibbering in
Arabic." The guards told him to be quiet.
The next morning, he was found dead. The body had "bloodshot" eyes,
lacerations on his wrists from the plastic ties, unexplained bruises
on his abdomen, and a fresh, bruised laceration on the back of his
head. US Army investigators noted that the body did not have
defensive bruises on his arms, an odd notation given that a man
cannot raise bound arms in defense. No autopsy was performed. The
death certificate lists the cause of death as unknown. It seems
likely that Mr. Kenami died of positional asphyxia because of how he
was restrained, hooded, and positioned. Positional asphyxia looks
just like death by a natural heart attack except for those telltale
conjunctival hemorrhages in his eyes.

There are countless other episodes like this of human beings in
American custody dying because of the mistreatment -- authorized by
Bush, Rumsfeld and others -- to which we subjected them. These are
murders and war crimes in every sense of the word. That the highest
level Bush officials and the President himself are responsible for
the policies that spawned these crimes against humanity have been
long known to anyone paying minimal attention, but now we have a
bipartisan Senate Report -- signed by the presidential nominee of
Bush's own political party -- that directly assigns culpability for
these war crimes to the President and his policies. It's nothing
less than a formal declaration from the Senate that the President and
his top aides are war criminals.
* * * * *
This Report was issued on Thursday. Not a single mention was made of
it on any of the Sunday news talk shows, with the sole exception
being when John McCain told George Stephanopoulos that it was "not
his job" to opine on whether criminal prosecutions were warranted for
the Bush officials whose policies led to these crimes. What really
matters, explained McCain, was not that we get caught up in the past,
but instead, that we ensure this never happens again -- yet, like
everyone else who makes this argument, he offered no explanation as
to how we could possibly ensure that "it never happens again" if we
simultaneously announce that our political leaders will be immunized,
not prosecuted, when they commit war crimes. Doesn't that mindset,
rather obviously, substantially increase the likelihood -- if not
render inevitable -- that such behavior will occur again? Other than
that brief exchange, this Senate Report was a non-entity on the
Sunday shows.
Instead, TV pundits were consumed with righteous anger over the
petty, titillating, sleazy Rod Blagojevich scandal, competing with
one another over who could spew the most derision and scorn for this
pitiful, lowly, broken individual and his brazen though relatively
inconsequential crimes. Every exciting detail was vouyeristically
and meticulously dissected by political pundits -- many, if not most,
of whom have never bothered to acquaint themselves with any of the
basic facts surrounding the monumental Bush lawbreaking and war
crimes scandals. TV "journalists" who have never even heard of the
Taguba report -- the incredible indictment issued by a former U.S.
General, who subsequently observed: "there is no longer any doubt as
to whether the current administration has committed war crimes. The
only question that remains to be answered is whether those who
ordered the use of torture will be held to account" -- spent the
weekend opining on the intricacies of Blogojevich's hair and terribly
upsetting propensity to use curse words.
The auction conducted by Blagojevich was just a slightly more
flamboyant, vulgar and reckless expression of how our national
political class conducts itself generally (are there really any
fundamental differences between Blagojevich's conduct and Chuck
Schumer's systematic, transparent influence-peddling and vote-selling
to Wall Street donors, as documented by this excellent and highly
incriminating New York Times piece from Sunday -- "A Champion of Wall
St. Reaps the Benefits")? But Blagojevich is an impotent figure,
stripped of all power, a national joke. And attacking and condemning
him is thus cheap and easy. It threatens nobody in power. To the
contrary, his downfall is deceptively and usefully held up as an
extreme aberration -- proof that government officials are held
accountable when they break the law.
The media fixation on the ultimately irrelevant Blagojevich scandal,
juxtaposed with their steadfast ignoring of the Senate report
documenting systematic U.S. war crimes, is perfectly reflective of
how our political establishment thinks. Blagojevich's laughable
scheme is transformed into a national fixation and made into the
target of collective hate sessions, while the systematic, ongoing
sale of the legislative process to corporations and their lobbyists
are overlooked as the normal course of business. Lynndie England is
uniformly scorned and imprisoned while George Bush, Dick Cheney and
Don Rumsfeld are headed off to lives of luxury, great wealth,
respect, and immunity from the consequences for their far more
serious crimes. And the courageous and principled career Justice
Department lawyer who blew the whistle on Bush's illegal spying
programs -- Thomas Tamm -- continues to have his life destroyed,
while the countless high-level government officials, lawyers and
judges who also knew about it and did nothing about it are rewarded
and honored, and those who committed the actual crimes are protected
and immunized.
Just ponder the uproar if, in any other country, the political
parties joined together and issued a report documenting that the
country's President and highest aides were directly responsible for
war crimes and widespread detainee abuse and death. Compare the
inevitable reaction to such an event if it happened in another
country to what happens in the U.S. when such an event occurs -- a
virtual media blackout, ongoing fixations by political journalists
with petty scandals, and an undisturbed consensus that, no matter
what else is true, high-level American political figures (as opposed
to powerless low-level functionaries) must never be held accountable
for their crimes.

UPDATE: Here -- from July of this year -- is one of the more
remarkable quotes of the Bush era; it's from Nancy Pelosi, who was
explicitly briefed on the CIA's torture program in 2002:

Q: You've ruled against impeaching George Bush and Dick Cheney, and
now Kucinich is trying to pass that. Why do you insist on not
impeaching these people, so that the world and America can really see
the crimes that they've committed?
PELOSI: I thought that impeachment would be divisive for the
country. . . . If somebody had a crime that the President had
committed, that would be a different story.

It's not like there's any evidence that Bush committed any crimes or
anything, said Pelosi. From Jane Mayer's The Dark Side (h/t Hume's
Ghost):

One year of the Afghan prison operation alone cost an estimated 100
million, which Congress hid in a classified annex of the first
supplemental Afghan appropriation bill in 2002. Among the services
that U.S. taxpayers unwittingly paid for were medieval-like dungeons,
including a reviled former brick factory outside of Kabul known
as "The Salt Pit." In 2004, a still-unidentified prisoner froze to
death there after a young CIA supervisor ordered guards to strip him
naked and chain him overnight to the concrete floor. The CIA has
never accounted for the death, nor publicly reprimanded the
supervisor. Instead, the Agency reportedly promoted him.

Those Blagojevich tapes sure are disgusting, aren't they? Let's
study those some more.

UPDATE II: Well worth reading on the various implications of the
Senate report are Dan Froomkin, Scott Horton, and Andrew Sullivan
(scroll down for multiple posts).

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