4-04-05, 9:51 am

The magnitude of revelations of torture committed at Abu Ghraib and other US-run detention facilties, among other human rights problems, will be among the issues raised by a delegation sent by the 400,000-member American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) to the UN Commission on Human Rights. 'The delegation seeks to bring issues of torture and detention ... to the Commission’s attention,' says a recent ACLU statement.

'If the U.S. government truly wants to be a beacon of liberty and freedom around the world,' said ACLU Associate Legal Director Ann Beeson, 'it must abide by the same universal human rights principles it requires of the rest of the world.' The UN commission is meeting now in Geneva, Switzerland.

New evidence of widespread prisoner abuse havs surfaced despite failues of the Bush administration to comply fully with a federal court order to release thousands of pages of documents related to the Pentagon's role in the treatment of prisoners captured in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The court order resulted from a June 2004 lawsuit filed by the civil liberties organization and other human rights organizations, including the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) and Veterans for Peace, after the Pentagon refused to respond to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request.

Papers filed in the suit characterized the Department of Defense's failure to comply with the FOIA request as 'a deliberate and unlawful withholding of information from the public.'

Since the court order, the Bush administration has released about 30,000 pages, but the civil liberties organizations say that documents that seem to provide the clearest evidence of prisoner abuse have been delayed to reduce press scrutiny.

Some documents were released recently to coincide with the Easter weekend, several days after the court's deadline, in order to minimize press coverage of the contents of the documents, says the ACLU, which has taken the lead in examining and publicizing most of the Pentagon's papers.

In an effort to spin the torture scandal its way, the Pentagon also released much of the material to selected reporters with less critical opinions of the US' role in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The contents of the documents showed that US soldiers and miltiary intelligence officials engaged in treatment of prisoners that violates various treaties and conventions against torture and abuse.

Released documents report killings, beatings, excessive exercise of prisoners while handcuffed, physical punishment of uncooperative prisoners, extreme isolation, mock executions, physical and sexual humiliation, and more.

Some documents use the word torture, in fact, to describe the activities soldiers were ordered to carry out. So far, at least 24 cases of murder of prisoners are being or have been officially investigated in Afghanistan and Iraq with 12 commited in US prison facilities.

The Center for Constitutional Rights, which aided in the lawsuit, says, 'at least 26 prisoners who died in American custody in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2002 were likely the victims of criminal homicide.” CCR adds that the Army and the Pentagon aren't doing enough to investigate and punish soldiers involved.

So far, out of the dozens of specific cases that have been reported, only a handful of low-level soldiers have been brought to trial or punished. For example, just last week Army Captain Rogelio Maynulet left a court martial smiling, a free man, although he was convicted of personally shooting to death a captured wounded Iraqi man near the city of Najaf. Two subordinate enlisted men were also convicted and will serve between one and three years in prison.

Courts martial that have punished low-ranking soldiers for their conduct is warranted, but so far have simply been used to cover up the responsibility of higher officials, including generals, Donald Rumsfeld, and Alberto Gonzales, says CCR.

The civil rights organization argues that the August 2002 memo from Jay Bybee to Alberto Gonzales, which stated that the President could authorize torture in the name of national security and that defined torture so narrowly that even conduct found to have happened in the highly publicized cases at Abu Ghraib would not come within the definition.

Gonzales acknowledged in his Attorney General confirmation testimony to the US Senate that he agreed with the Bybee memo at the time it was written. This memo became the basis for April 2003 DOD working group report upon which interrogation techniques were apparently based.

Last week, the ACLU revealed a document signed by the highest ranking general in Iraq, Lt. General Ricardo Sanchez, outlining interrogation techniques that complied with this Pentagon's working group's findings.

A clear line that exists from the widespread brutal activites taking place in US prison facilties in Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba and other places all the way up to members of the Bush cabinet is being obscured by highly publicized trials of very low-level personnel and repeated claims of 'a few bad apples.'

CCR is calling for the appointment of a Special Prosecutor to conduct a full, independent and public inquiry into the role of high-ranking U.S. officials in the abuse and torture of detainees in Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantánamo and elsewhere around the world.

So far, CCR has filed a number of lawsuits against members of Bush's cabinet, most recently Donald Rumsfeld, in order to hold higher-ranking officials responsible for their particpation in the abuse of prisoners held by the US.

The Pentagon's policy, despite a self-authored and self-serving report released weeks ago in which the Pentagon exonerated itself, originated in the bowels of the Justice Department, was finely tuned by Pentagon bureaucrats, and was obediently carried out by soldiers in the field.



--Joel Wendland is managing editor of Political Affairs and may be reached at jwendland@politicalaffairs.net.