Neiman Watchdog: "Dogging The Torture Story"

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http://niemanwatchdog.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=ask_this.view&askthisid=00214

"Questions The Press Should Ask"

Dogging the torture story

ASK THIS | July 11, 2006
Reporters should demand that the two men most responsible for acts of torture by U.S. forces explain themselves, writes Colin Powell’s former chief of staff -- who says a paper trail clearly links the practice of prisoner abuse to the upper reaches of the Pentagon and Vice President Cheney's office.

By Larry Wilkerson

Ask Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld

Q. Define torture.

Q. Do we do torture?

Q. There have been dozens of homicides and more than a hundred deaths in U.S. custody. Is killing someone not the ultimate torture?

Q. If those cases were just the work of bad apples, why were the investigations dragged out so long? Why, for instance, did it take the Army two years before filing charges related to the homicides at Bagram Air Force Base in December 2002?

Q. Why are the sentences for the “bad apples” so light? Isn’t it the case that in these military courts martial, their military peers recognize they were following orders?

Documents and memos that have already made their way into the public domain make it clear that the Office of the Vice President bears responsibility for creating an environment conducive to the acts of torture and murder committed by U.S. forces in the war on terror.

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One Report Undone

The following excerpt is from the Executive Summary of the March 2005 report to Secretary Rumsfeld prepared, at the Secretary's direction, by the Navy Inspector General, Vice Admiral Albert Church. It was written to explain the "why" of detainee abuse as much as these investigators understood that "why". The report flatly concludes: “We found no link between approved interrogation techniques and detainee abuse.” (This report was rendered when the totals for abuse were much lower as well).

(U) Underlying Reasons for Abuse

(U) If approved interrogation policy did not cause detainee abuse, the question remains: what did? While we cannot offer a definitive answer, we studied the DoD investigation reports for all 70 cases of closed, substantiated detainee abuse to see if we could detect any patterns or underlying explanations. Our analysis of these 70 cases showed that they involved abuses perpetrated by a variety of active duty, reserve and national guard personnel from three services on different dates and in different locations throughout Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as a small number of cases at GTMO. While this diversity argues against a single, overarching reason for abuse, we did identify several factors that may help explain why the abuse occurred.

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