Getting Away with Torture?
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Human Rights Watch April 2005 Vol. 17, No. 1(G) Getting Away with Torture? Command Responsibility for the U.S. Abuse of Detainees Executive Summary .....................................................................................................................................1 Recommendations........................................................................................................................................7 I. Official Sanction of Crimes against Detainees.....................................................................................8 II. A World of Abuse................................................................................................................................ 13 III. Getting Away with Torture............................................................................................................... 16 In-house Investigations down the Chain of Command.................................................................. 19 Prosecuting Some Soldiers, Belatedly ................................................................................................ 26 IV. Impunity for the Architects of Illegal Policy.................................................................................. 27 Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld ............................................................................................29 Former CIA Director George Tenet ................................................................................................. 49 Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez................................................................................................. 63 Major General Geoffrey Miller........................................................................................................... 71 Other Generals in Iraq......................................................................................................................... 76 Abu Ghraib-based Officers................................................................................................................. 78 V. Non-Governmental Attempts at Accountability............................................................................. 80 VI. The Need for a Special Prosecutor.................................................................................................. 82 VII. An Independent Commission......................................................................................................... 86 Annex — A Note on Command Responsibility .................................................................................. 88 Acknowledgements................................................................................................................................... 93 Executive Summary It has now been one year since the appearance of the first pictures of U.S. soldiers humiliating and torturing detainees at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Shortly after the photos came out, President George W. Bush vowed that the “wrongdoers will be brought to justice.” In the intervening months, it has become clear that torture and abuse have taken place not solely at Abu Ghraib but rather in dozens of U.S. detention facilities worldwide, that in many cases the abuse resulted in death or severe trauma, and that a good number of the victims were civilians with no connection to al-Qaeda or terrorism. There is also evidence of abuse at U.S.-controlled “secret locations” abroad and of U.S. authorities sending suspects to third-country dungeons around the world where torture was likely to occur. To date, however, the only wrongdoers being brought to justice are those at the bottom of the chain-of-command. The evidence demands more. Yet a wall of impunity surrounds the architects of the policies responsible for the larger pattern of abuses. As this report shows, evidence is mounting that high-ranking U.S. civilian and military leaders — including Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, former CIA Director George Tenet, Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, formerly the top U.S. commander in Iraq, and Major General Geoffrey Miller, the former commander of the prison camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba — made decisions and issued policies that facilitated serious and widespread violations of the law. The circumstances strongly suggest that they either knew or should have known that such violations took place as a result of their actions. There is also mounting data that, when presented with evidence that abuse was in fact taking place, they failed to act to stem the abuse. The coercive methods approved by senior U.S. officials and widely employed over the last three years include tactics that the United States has repeatedly condemned as barbarity and torture when practiced by others. Even the U.S. Army field manual condemns some of these methods as torture. Although much relevant evidence remains secret, a series of revelations over the past twelve months, brought together here, already makes a compelling case for a thorough, genuinely independent investigation of what top officials did, what they knew, and how they responded when they became aware of the widespread nature of the abuses. We know, for example, that the coercive interrogation methods approved by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld for use on prisoners at Guantánamo — including the use of guard dogs to induce fear in prisoners, “stress” techniques such as forced standing and shackling in 1 HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH VOL. 17, NO. 1(G) painful positions, and removing their clothes — “migrated to Afghanistan and Iraq, where they were neither limited nor safeguarded,” and contributed to the widespread and systematic torture and abuse at U.S. detention centers there. Inquiries established by the U.S. Department of Defense itself have shown as much, though they did not explicitly say so. We know that some detainees in the “global war on terror” have even been “disappeared” after entering U.S. custody: the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) continues to hold al-Qaeda suspects in prolonged incommunicado detention in “secret locations,” reportedly outside the United States, with no notification to their families, no access to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) or oversight of any sort of their treatment, and in some cases no acknowledgement that they are even being held. It is widely reported that some of these “disappeared detainees” have been tortured through techniques such as “waterboarding,” in which the prisoner’s head is submerged into water or covered with a wet cloth until he believes that he is drowning. We also know that some 100-150 detainees have been “rendered” by the United States for detention and interrogation by governments in the Middle East such as Syria and Egypt, which, according to the U.S. State Department, practice torture routinely. Such rendition is, again, a violation of U.S. and international law. In an increasing number of cases, there is now credible evidence that rendered detainees have in fact been tortured. Despite these revelations and findings, the United States has not engaged in a serious process of accountability. Officials have denounced the most egregious abuses, rhetorically reaffirmed the U.S. commitment to uphold the law and respect human rights, and belatedly opened a number of prosecutions for crimes committed against detainees in Afghanistan and Iraq. To date, however, with the exception of one major personally implicated in abuse, only low-ranking soldiers — privates and sergeants — have been called to account. While there are obviously steep political obstacles in the way of investigating a sitting defense secretary and other high-ranking officials, the nature of crimes is so serious, and mounting evidence of wrongdoing is now so voluminous, that it would be an abdication of responsibility for the United States not to push this to the next level. HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH VOL. 17, NO. 1(G) 2 The Price of Impunity Unless those who designed or authorized the illegal policies are held to account, all the protestations of “disgust” at the Abu Ghraib photos by President George W. Bush1 and others will be meaningless. If there is no real accountability for these crimes, for years to come the perpetrators of atrocities around the world will point to the U.S.’s treatment of prisoners to deflect criticism of their own conduct. Indeed, when a government as dominant and influential as the United States openly defies laws against torture, it virtually invites others to do the same. Washington’s much-needed credibility as a proponent of human rights was damaged by the torture revelations and will be further damaged if torture continues to be followed by complete impunity for the policy-makers. Torture, unfortunately, can occur anywhere. What matters, and what determines whether torture is a mere aberration or state policy, is how a government responds. Secretary Rumsfeld recognized this when, shortly after the first public revelations, he “[said] to the world: Judge us by our actions. Watch how Americans, watch how a democracy deals with wrongdoing and scandal and the pain of acknowledging and correcting our own mistakes and weaknesses.” 2 Then-Secretary of State Colin Powell recognized this, too, when he told foreign leaders: “Watch America. Watch how we deal with this. Watch how America will do the right thing.”3 Regrettably, however, the United States is not doing the right thing. Rather, it is doing what dictatorships do the world over when their abuses are discovered — loudly proclaiming its respect for