Senate Report: Rumsfeld to Blame for Detainee Abuses
By Alan Stewart Carl | Related entries in Iraq, McCain, Senate, Terrorism, Torture, War
A new report from the Senate Armed Services Committee places significant blame for abuses at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay on former Sec. of Defense Donald Rumsfeld
The report’s executive summary, made public by the committee’s Democratic chairman Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan and its top Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona, said Rumsfeld contributed to the abuse by authorizing aggressive interrogation techniques at Guantanamo Bay on December 2, 2002.
He rescinded the authorization six weeks later. But the report said word of his approval continued to spread within U.S. military circles and encouraged the use of harsh techniques as far away as Iraq and Afghanistan.
The report concluded 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.”
The report concluded that the abuses were not merely a case of a few soldiers acting on their own but the result of decisions made at the highest levels within the Department of Defense. The report also faults President Bush for signing a memorandum in February of 2002 that stated the Geneva Convention did not apply to the U.S. war with al Qaeda.
While I know there are still plenty of people who view torture as an acceptable means of extracting information from terrorists, I have long argued that we damage the deepest principles of America and compromise our moral authority when we resort to abuse — even when we do so in the name of our own defense. The “but our enemies are worse†argument holds no water for me. Yes, they are much, much worse. That doesn’t matter. We can’t let our enemies set the standards for morality.
Careful observers have long known that the instances of detainee abuse were not just the result of a few “overzealous†soldiers but the result of an administration that overreached in its quest for victory. I’m glad the Senate Armed Services Committee was willing to place the blame where it belongs: at the top.
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This entry was posted on Thursday, December 11th, 2008 and is filed under Iraq, McCain, Senate, Terrorism, Torture, War. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
December 12th, 2008 at 9:18 am
And what of the soldiers who were imprisoned for their role in the Abu Ghraib incidents. Low ranking soldiers were prosecuted and imprisoned so that the DOD could absolve themselves of responsibility. Whatever twisted rationale the defenders of these policies offer about the need for “enhanced interrogation”, there is no defense for willingly imprisoning soldiers for following their orders.
December 12th, 2008 at 11:09 am
Forget moral authority. Torture is generally held, by many intelligence professionals, to yield bad intelligence. As the man said, you’d be surprised at how far a can of orange soda would go.