Torture Continues

With all the horror expressed at the revelations of prisoner abuse in Iraq and Afghanistan by American troops, one would think that it would have stopped. Guess again.

Inspectors looking for evidence of torture of prisoners by U.S. military and intelligence officers in Iraq keep finding more and more evidence that America no longer plays by the rules of the Geneva Convention Writes Ellen Knickmeyer of The Washington Post:

Last Nov. 13, U.S. soldiers found 173 incarcerated men, some of them emaciated and showing signs of torture, in a secret bunker in an Interior Ministry compound in central Baghdad. The soldiers immediately transferred the men to a separate detention facility to protect them from further abuse, the U.S. military reported.

Since then, there have been at least six joint U.S.-Iraqi inspections of detention centers, most of them run by Iraq's Shiite Muslim-dominated Interior Ministry. Two sources involved with the inspections, one Iraqi official and one U.S. official, said abuse of prisoners was found at all the sites visited through February.

But U.S. troops have not responded by removing all the detainees, as they did in November. Instead, according to U.S. and Iraqi officials, only a handful of the most severely abused detainees at a single site were removed for medical treatment. Prisoners at two other sites were removed to alleviate overcrowding. U.S. and Iraqi authorities left the rest where they were.

The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff publicly contradicted Donald Rumsfeld in regards to the abuse issue, at a news conference last fall. Marine Gen. Peter Pace, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, pledged that U.S. troops would attempt to stop inhumane treatment if they saw it.

Pace said at a news conference Nov. 29 with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, "It is absolutely the responsibility of every U.S. service member, if they see inhumane treatment being conducted, to intervene to stop it." Turning to Pace, Rumsfeld responded: "I don't think you mean they have an obligation to physically stop it; it's to report it."

"If they are physically present when inhumane treatment is taking place, sir, they have an obligation to try to stop it," Pace answered.

Well General – whats happened to the lofty ideals? While you're at it, see how Sen. John Warner is doing on his promised investigation to get to the bottom of the abuse scandal and ensure it never happens again.
Posted on The Human Stain