Editorials: Who is responsible?
C 0 III M 0 N W E A L Who is responsible? t is becoming increasingly clear that the torture of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison was not an isolated incident or merely the work of poorly...
...Similar outrages, including the murder of prisoners, are emerging concerning other prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan...
...Is it so surprising, then, that young soldiers, told they were sent to Iraq to "bring the war to the terrorists" would treat prisoners inhumanely...
...Mukesh Kapila, UN coordinator for Sudan, told the Economist (May 15) that the situation constitutes "the worst humanitarian crisis in the world...
...Yet, despite universal acknowledgment of the catastrophe the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse represents, no high-ranking administration official or military officer has tendered his resignation...
...To be sure, atrocities occur even in situations where the Geneva Conventions are recognized by all parties...
...The task of winning the hearts and minds of Iraqis has become immeasurably harder, and the president's new public-relations campaign seeking to emphasize Iraq's "future" rather than the recent past, is unlikely to alter the situation on the ground...
...Whatever hopes there might have been that the Arab and Muslim world would take the stated reasons for the war against Iraq at face value have disappeared...
...The pictures of American soldiers abusing and humiliating Iraqi prisoners have done enormous damage...
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...Some JAGs hate this and are horrified thatthe tolerance of mistreatment will come back and haunt us in the next war," he told the New Yorker...
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...Responsibility for setting the conditions that permitted these crimes to be committed lies higher up the chain of command...
...In effect, said Power, "the United States has so undermined its standing in the world that it actually has proven itself incapable of speaking up on behalf of principle in other areas...
...Rumsfeld has lowered the bar...
...credibility and limited the number of troops Washington has to offer—none—that no other country has yet responded...
...This should not be surprising...
...Despite the strenuous protests of the State Department over the self-defeating consequences of such actions, the president evidently embraced the conclusions of the memo...
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...Certainly those directly involved must be punished...
...Nor has President Bush fired anyone or demanded any resignations...
...As reported by Slate, the military lawyers told Horton that when they approached Douglas Feith, the third highest-ranking civilian in the Defense Department, with their concerns, he was unmoved...
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...But just when some respite from the bloodletting seemed possible, another disaster broke out, this one in the western Darfur region, an area the size of France...
...In explicitly placing Americans above the law, the administration greatly increased the probability that prisoners would be abused...
...Even there, the Khartoum government has pursued and attacked the refugees...
...military "did not have to comply with any international laws in the handling of detainees in the war on terrorism...
...Unfortunately, the president's other foreignpolicy initiatives, specifically in Iraq, have so weakened U.S...
...She told interviewer David Brancaccio that as many as four hundred thousand refugees "will be dead by December if they are not reached and rescued...
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...Estimates say that more than 2 million people have died and twice as many have been displaced—most to border countries, but some as far away as to the United States...
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...After all, the administration explicitly rejected the Geneva Conventions with regard to the interrogation of prisoners in Afghanistan, arguing that the treaties did not apply to nonuniformed terrorists...
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...Samantha Power, an expert on wars of ethnic cleansing, spelled out the near-term consequences during an interview on PBS's Now (May 7...
...Still, the conventions provide an invaluable check against any systematic persecution of prisoners...
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...We're giving the world a ready-made excuse to ignore the Geneva Conventions...
...Words have consequences...
...Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, has had similar conversations with outraged members of the military, who know that the failure to abide by international law in treating prisoners endangers Americans, especially American soldiers...
...Despite claims by the Bush administration and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld that the Geneva Conventions were applied to prisoners in Iraq, there is now evidence that efforts were made to circumvent the legal protections accorded prisoners...
...In the last year alone, more than a million people have fled their villages, and another hundred thousand have streamed across the border to Chad, one of Africa's poorest but most hospitable countries...
...Instead of recognizing the explosive nature of those charges, the Army contended that many Iraqi prisoners were not entitled to the full protections of the Geneva Conventions...
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...For decades, an unrelenting civil war has raged there between the Muslim-dominated north and the black animists and Christians in the south...
...Scott Horton, former chairman of the Committee on International Human Rights of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York, was approached last year by a group of military Judge Advocate General lawyers (JAGs) who were concerned about the administration's attitude toward the Geneva Conventions...
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...Moreover, it is President George W. Bush who has insisted repeatedly on conflating the "war on terrorism" with the invasion and occupation of Iraq...
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...We now know that 70 to 80 percent of those held had nothing to do with the insurgency...
...Having given orders that prisoners were to be "softened up" for interrogation, what did those in charge expect...
...Some prominent supporters of the administration have called on Rumsfeld and other highly placed architects of the war to resign...
...Responding to demands for greater autonomy from the black Muslim majority in that region, the government instigated and enabled Arab marauders to sweep in and pillage, rape, and kill their black co-religionists...
...Legislation has been introduced in both houses of Congress condemning Khartoum's policy in Darfur, and President George W. Bush has called for an international response...
...Despite the debacle in Iraq, the American people and their representatives must, in concert with other nations, act to end ethnic cleansing in Darfur...
...I mean," " she emphasized, "that's half the Rwanda tally...
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...It is remarkable—and remarkably alarming—that the American people cannot expect the same sense of accountability from their government...
...In recent years, the discovery of significant oil deposits in the south, coupled with the imposition of strict Islamic law by the government in Khartoum, has fed the ongoing conflagration...
...But the misguided effort to find excuses for evading the Geneva Conventions began at high levels of the administration almost immediately after 9/11...
...t is becoming increasingly clear that the torture of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison was not an isolated incident or merely the work of poorly trained and undisciplined Army reservists...
...May 25, 2004 COLLATERAL DAMAGE Sudan is Africa's largest country, greater in size than Texas and Alaska combined...
...Was it likely that interrogation techniques would change once the "war on terrorism" got to Iraq...
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...Following numerous broken cease-fires, the government and the s6uthern rebels—neither group model citizens—have at last almost reached an agreement for a six-year truce...
...Many, like Rumsfeld and the generals in charge of the prisons, have said they "accept full responsibility," but what accepting responsibility entails remains a mystery...
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...Ten years after Rwanda, we must not remain silent on events in Sudan...
...According to Power, "the Bush administration is the only...country at the UN that has drawn attention to this suffering...
...It is worth remembering how conservative supporters of the president and his policies exulted last year when a New York Times reporter was found to have plagiarized and invented a series of news stories...
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...The administration strongly implied that in the war against terrorism a double standard existed: international law applied to the terrorists but not to the United States...
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...For an administration that likes to stress the importance of individual responsibility, this failure to hold people accountable can only further erode public confidence in the president's judgment and in the conduct of the war...
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...As early as last November, the International Red Cross protested the mistreatment of prisoners, "including deliberate physical violence," at Abu Ghraib...
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...Who is responsible for the egregious failures at Abu Ghraib...
...If the occupation of Iraq is but one battle in the war against terrorism, then by the president's own logic Iraqi resistance is by definition "terrorism...
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...They said [Feith] had a dismissive, if not derisive, attitude toward the Geneva Conventions," Horton said...
Vol. 131 • June 2004 • No. 11
