Torture in the gulag: "The story begins in Afghanistan"

"I wouldn't join the International Criminal Court. It's a body based in The Hague where unaccountable judges and prosecutors can pull our troops or diplomats up for trial.

"And I wouldn't join it. And I understand that in certain capitals around the world that that wasn't a popular move. But it's the right move not to join a foreign court that could -- where our people could be prosecuted." - George W. Bush 09/30/04

"Men without conscience are capable of any cruelty the human mind can imagine." - Dick Cheney 01/26/05

I've alluded before to how a thorough investigation by a court or by Congress of the John Walker Lindh could have exposed a number of bad practices that would have spared the US a lot of trouble if they had been corrected immediately.  (here and here).  Recent revelations about torture in the gulag station at Bagram, Afghanistan, are a reminder of this.

Report implicates top brass in Bagram scandal by Julian Borger Guardian (UK) 05/21/05

The Pentagon denied that the Abu Ghraib scandal could have been prevented if the Bagram abuses had been investigated faster. Carrying out an inquiry in Afghanistan was bound to take longer. But John Sifton, an Afghanistan expert at Human Rights Watch, said this was "a convenient excuse".

"The White House always put forward, that Abu Ghraib was an exception, just some rotten apples," he said. "But US personnel in Afghanistan were involved in killings and torture of prisoners well before the Iraq war even started.

"The story begins in Afghanistan."

Indeed it does.

This Seymour Hersh column summarizes some of the grim facts that have come to light about the torture scandal:

The unknown unknowns of the Abu Ghraib scandal by Seymour Hersh Guardian (UK) 05/21/05 He writes (my emphasis):

It's been over a year since I published a series of articles in the New Yorker outlining the abuses at Abu Ghraib. There have been at least 10 official military investigations since then - none of which has challenged the official Bush administration line that there was no high-level policy condoning or overlooking such abuse. The buck always stops with the handful of enlisted army reservists from the 372nd Military Police Company whose images fill the iconic Abu Ghraib photos with their inappropriate smiles and sadistic posing of the prisoners. ...

The 10 official inquiries into Abu Ghraib are asking the wrong questions, at least in terms of apportioning ultimate responsibility for the treatment of prisoners. The question that never gets adequately answered is this: what did the president do after being told about Abu Ghraib? It is here that chronology becomes very important.

After spelling out the chronology, which provides strong circumstantial evidence that the torture policy was carried out with Bush's knowledge and approval, he writes (my emphasis):

Three days later [in 2004] the army began an investigation [of the Abu Ghuraib torture]. But it is what was not done that is significant. There is no evidence that President Bush, upon learning of the devastating conduct at Abu Ghraib, asked any hard questions of Rumsfeld and his own aides in the White House; no evidence that they took any significant steps, upon learning in mid-January of the abuses, to review and modify the military's policy toward prisoners. I was told by a high-level former intelligence official that within days of the first reports the judicial system was programmed to begin prosecuting the enlisted men and women in the photos and to go no further up the chain of command. ...

Despite Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo - not to mention Iraq and the failure of intelligence - and the various roles they played in what went wrong, Rumsfeld kept his job; Rice was promoted to secretary of state; Alberto Gonzales, who commissioned the memos justifying torture, became attorney general; deputy secretary of defence Paul Wolfowitz was nominated to the presidency of the World Bank; and Stephen Cambone, under-secretary of defence for intelligence and one of those most directly involved in the policies on prisoners, was still one of Rumsfeld's closest confidants. President Bush, asked about accountability, told the Washington Post before his second inauguration that the American people had supplied all the accountability needed - by re-electing him. Only seven enlisted men and women have been charged or pleaded guilty to offences relating to Abu Ghraib. No officer is facing criminal proceedings.

The Guardian comments editorially on the Bagram report revealed by the New York Times: Abuses of power Guardian (UK) 05/21/05 leader [editorial] (my emphasis):

Some of the facts were already known and have been called "isolated cases". But the New York Times article, citing a 2,000-page military investigation file, names interrogators and victims and graphically describes the routine actions of young, poorly trained soldiers that resulted in criminal charges against seven. Methods included chaining prisoners in painful positions (ignoring warnings from the Red Cross), as well as beatings and verbal and sexual abuse. Many Bagram personnel, led by the same officer, were redeployed to Baghdad and used similar interrogation techniques at Abu Ghraib. Crucially, the soldiers believed - following a determination by President Bush in early 2002 - that the Geneva conventions on prisoners of war did not apply to al-Qaida and Taliban fighters. Detainees were to be considered "terrorists" until proved otherwise.

These findings are a reminder of the need for combative media in wartime - and an antidote to high-minded outrage from the administration over Newsweek magazine's story, later retracted, about the desecration of a Qur'an at Guantánamo. Universal justice and American values require that the perpetrators - and those who authorised their acts - are held to account. As so often with Iraq and the "war on terror", some will retort that however regrettable, such abuses are overshadowed by the mass, random brutality of terrorists and the murderous Ba'athist regime. That is utterly irrelevant to these cases ...

The last point often isn't made effectively enough.  If we are going to have laws of war, we can't excuse ignoring them because the enemy is evil.  The Enemy is always evil.  But it doesn't excuse torturing prisoners, many of whom are suspects arrested with little or no legitimate cause.