Commanders Responsible for Abu Ghraib
The responsibility ultimately lies with President Bush, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, then White House counsel, who decided that the Geneva Conventions on Humanitarian Treatment of Prisoners of War didn't apply in the "war on terrorism."
Among the military hierarchy, only Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, an Army reserve officer who commanded the military police unit at Abu Ghraib, has paid a price. Karpinski, who was relieved of her command and given a written reprimand, claims she is a "scapegoat" and plans to fight the charge.
... In a recent interview with the San Francisco Chronicle, Karpinski pointed to the role of Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, who had been sent from his duty at the Guantanamo Bay, prison -- known as "gitmo" -- to Iraq where his orders were to "gitmoize" Abu Ghraib. Miller told officers there "to treat the prisoners like dogs."
... Civil rights groups, including Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and the American Civil Liberties Union, are appalled at the Green report.
Human Rights Watch has called on Gonzales to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the roles of all U.S. officials "who participated in, ordered, or had command responsibility for war crimes or torture."
The human rights group also called for a bipartisan probe -- similar to the 9/11 commission investigation -- to look into the roles of Bush, Rumsfeld and former CIA director George Tenet.
"We believe that if the U.S. is going to wipe away the stain of Abu Ghraib, it needs to investigate those at the top who ordered or condoned abuse, and to come clean on what the president has authorized and repudiate once and for all the mistreatment of detainees in the war on terror," said Reed Brody, Human Rights Watch special counsel.
He said the fact that you have the same kinds of abuses going on in three different theaters (Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantanamo) suggests that the responsibility is higher up. The civil rights groups said the military appears to be incapable of investigating itself.
- posted by geoff @ #