[Mb-civic] Rebellion Against Abuse - Washington Post editorial

[William Swiggard]

Rebellion Against Abuse

Thursday, November 3, 2005; Page A20

LAST MONTH a prisoner at the Guantanamo Bay military base excused 
himself from a conversation with his lawyer and stepped into a cell, 
where he slashed his arm and hung himself. This desperate attempted 
suicide by a detainee held for four years without charge, trial or any 
clear prospect of release was not isolated. At least 131 Guantanamo 
inmates began a hunger strike on Aug. 8 to protest their indefinite 
confinement, and more than two dozen are being kept alive only by 
force-feeding. No wonder Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has denied 
permission to U.N. human rights investigators to meet with detainees at 
Guantanamo: Their accounts would surely add to the discredit the United 
States has earned for its lawless treatment of foreign prisoners.

Guantanamo, however, is not the worst problem. As The Post's Dana Priest 
reported yesterday, the CIA maintains its own network of secret prisons, 
into which 100 or more terrorist suspects have "disappeared" as if they 
were victims of a Third World dictatorship. Some of the 30 most 
important prisoners are being held in secret facilities in Eastern 
European countries -- which should shame democratic governments that 
only recently dismantled Soviet-era secret police apparatuses. Held in 
dark underground cells, the prisoners have no legal rights, no visitors 
from outside the CIA and no checks on their treatment, even by the 
International Red Cross. President Bush has authorized interrogators to 
subject these men to "cruel, inhuman and degrading" treatment that is 
illegal in the United States and that is banned by a treaty ratified by 
the Senate. The governments that allow the CIA prisons on their 
territory violate this international law, if not their own laws.

This shameful situation is the direct result of Mr. Bush's decision in 
February 2002 to set aside the Geneva Conventions as well as standing 
U.S. regulations for the handling of detainees. Under the Geneva 
Conventions, al Qaeda militants could have been denied prisoner-of-war 
status and held indefinitely; they could have been interrogated and 
tried, either in U.S. courts or under the military system of justice. At 
the same time they would have been protected by Geneva from torture and 
other cruel treatment. Had Mr. Bush followed that course, the abuse 
scandals at Guantanamo Bay and in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the severe 
damage they have caused to the United States, could have been averted. 
Key authors of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, such as Khalid Sheikh 
Mohammed and Ramzi Binalshibh, could have been put on trial, with their 
crimes exposed to the world.

Instead, not a single al Qaeda leader has been prosecuted in the past 
four years. The Pentagon's system of hearings on the status of 
Guantanamo detainees, introduced only after a unanimous ruling by the 
Supreme Court, has no way of resolving the long-term status of most 
detainees. The CIA has no long-term plan for its secret prisoners, whom 
one agency official described as "a horrible burden."

For some time a revolt against this disastrous policy has been gathering 
steam inside the administration and in the Senate; it is led by senators 
such as John McCain (R-Ariz.) and by the same military officers and 
State Department officials who opposed Mr. Bush's decision to disregard 
the Geneva accords. Their opponents are a small group of civilian 
political appointees circled around Mr. Rumsfeld and Vice President 
Cheney. According to a report in the New York Times, the military 
professionals want to restore Geneva's protections against cruel 
treatment to the Pentagon's official doctrine for handling detainees. 
Mr. McCain is seeking to ban "cruel, inhuman and degrading" treatment 
for all detainees held by the United States, including those in the 
CIA's secret prisons.

There is no more important issue before the country or Congress. Yet the 
advocates of decency and common sense seem to have meager support from 
the Democratic Party. Senate Democrats staged a legislative stunt on 
Tuesday intended to reopen -- once again -- the debate on prewar 
intelligence about Iraq. They have taken no such dramatic stand against 
the CIA's abuses of foreign prisoners; on a conference committee 
considering Mr. McCain's amendment, Democratic support has been 
faltering. While Democrats grandstand about a war debate that took place 
three years ago, the Bush administration's champions of torture are 
quietly working to preserve policies whose reversal ought to be an 
urgent priority.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/02/AR2005110202742.html?referrer=email
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