McClatchy's America's prison for terrorists often held innocent men piece yesterday ought to have produced screaming headlines and constant chatter about the crimes that the Bush administration had committed at Guantanamo.
The findings by the comprehensive, unprecedented McClatchy interviews "...conducted with former Guantanamo detainees by a U.S. news organization" and US officials talking on background produced nothing of the kind, telling us much about the politcal culture.
In sum, the administration tortured innocents who they knew to be innocent, devised a legal framework to shield the US government from being held accountable, and broke the international laws on human rights self-consciously and shamelessly.
Among the findings:
- A series of White House directives placed 'suspected enemy combatants' beyond the reach of U.S. law or the 1949 Geneva Conventions' protections for prisoners of war. President Bush and Congress then passed legislation that protected those detention rules.
- In 2002, a CIA analyst interviewed several dozen detainees at Guantanamo and reported to senior National Security Council officials that many of them didn't belong there, a former White House official said.
- Despite the analyst's findings, the administration made no further review of the Guantanamo detainees. The White House had determined that all of them were enemy combatants, the former official said.
- Rather than taking a closer look at whom they were holding, a group of five White House, Justice Department and Pentagon lawyers who called themselves the 'War Council' devised a legal framework that enabled the administration to detain suspected 'enemy combatants' indefinitely with few legal rights.
The threat of new terrorist attacks, the War Council argued, allowed President Bush to disregard or rewrite American law, international treaties and the Uniform Code of Military Justice to permit unlimited detentions and harsh interrogations.
- The group further argued that detainees had no legal right to defend themselves, and that American soldiers — along with the War Council members, their bosses and Bush — should be shielded from prosecution for actions that many experts argue are war crimes.
- With the support of Bush, Cheney and then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, the group shunted aside the military justice system, and in February 2002, Bush suspended the legal protection for detainees spelled out in Common Article Three of the 1949 Geneva Convention on prisoners of war, which outlaws degrading treatment and torture.
Today a Washington Post piece, Report Questions Pentagon Accounts,
Officials Looked Into Interrogation Methods Early On, contains similar revelations.
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