"If The Detainee Dies You're Doing It Wrong"

From examiner.com today:

"McClatchy has published several articles in the last week exposing details of the U.S. use of torture as an interrogation tool.

McClatchy on the Bagram facility in Afghanistan:

"Former guards and detainees whom McClatchy interviewed said Bagram was a center of systematic brutality for at least 20 months, starting in late 2001. Yet the soldiers responsible have escaped serious punishment.

The eight-month McClatchy investigation found a pattern of abuse that continued for years. The abuse of detainees at Bagram has been reported by U.S. media organizations, in particular The New York Times, which broke several developments in the story. But the extent of the mistreatment, and that it eclipsed the alleged abuse at Guantanamo, hasn't previously been revealed.

The brutality at Bagram peaked in December 2002, when U.S. soldiers beat two Afghan detainees, Habibullah and Dilawar, to death as they hung by their wrists.

Dilawar died on Dec. 10, seven days after Habibullah died. He'd been hit in his leg so many times that the tissue was "falling apart" and had "basically been pulpified," said then-Lt. Col. Elizabeth Rouse, the Air Force medical examiner who performed the autopsy on him.
The report indicates two U.S. soldiers were charged with assault. Charges were dropped for one and the other was reduced in rank to private. Why so lenient? Executive orders from the Bush Administration had rescinded Geneva Convention protections and made prosecution for war crimes difficult, if not impossible.

Today McClatchy published an article outlining the CIA's involvement in detainee interrogation training:

The CIA, which had authority to use harsh interrogation techniques on suspected terrorist detainees, advised U.S. military officials at Guantanamo in 2002 on how far they could go in extracting information from captives there, documents released at a Senate hearing Tuesday show.

"If the detainee dies you're doing it wrong," Jonathan Fredman, chief counsel to the CIA's Counterterrorism Center, told a meeting of officials on Oct. 2, 2002, according to minutes from the meeting.

Sen. Carl Levin, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, which is investigating the origin of techniques that resulted in abuse at Guantanamo, Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison, and elsewhere, said the documents show that the abuse was not the result of "a few bad apples" within the military _ as the White House has claimed.

"The truth is that senior officials in the United States government sought information on aggressive techniques, twisted the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorized their use against detainees," said Levin, a Michigan Democrat.
When abuse at Abu Ghraib prison became known, the Bush Administration assured Americans the abuse of Iraqis was an aberration, the crimes of a "few bad apples". It's become very clear that Abu Ghraib was, by no means, an aberration, but just an example of a widespread and concerted effort by the Bush Administration to toss out long standing rules of interrogation and then lie and cover up to hide their involvement."