Exposed: Torture Begins at the Top

http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/121804X.shtml

Torture Begins at the Top
By Joe Conason
Salon.com

Friday 17 December 2004

Renewed exposure of prisoner abuse, torture and even murder by American military personnel in Iraq and Afghanistan is widening already deep divisions between the Pentagon and the intelligence community - and creating an untenable situation for Donald Rumsfeld, the beleaguered secretary of defense. A recently disclosed FBI memo indicates that "marching orders" to abandon traditional interrogation methods came from the defense secretary himself.

In recent days, a coalition of human rights groups led by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Constitutional Rights has brought new cases of abuse to public attention. Using the Freedom of Information Act, they have pried thousands of pages of previously secret documents from the Defense Department and other agencies.

Even after the shock of Abu Ghraib, these substantiated stories of cruelty, sadism and lawlessness are stunning. Files from the Navy's Criminal Investigative Service describe how U.S. Marines ordered four Iraqi teenagers to kneel while a gun was "discharged to conduct a mock execution"; how they inflicted severe burns on a detainee's hands with flaming alcohol; and how they tortured another detainee with an electric transformer, making him "dance." In June, a Navy investigator revealed in an e-mail that his caseload of "high visibility" cases of abuse was "exploding." As a result of such offenses, at least two Marines were convicted and sent to prison.

If justice has been done in a few cases, the ACLU documents show that abuses were more common - and more extreme - than the Bush administration had previously conceded. More important, however, the documents show that the impetus for abuse came from above, not below. The use of coercive and violent methods spread from Guantánamo Bay, where alleged Taliban and al-Qaida prisoners are incarcerated, to Iraq and Afghanistan.
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This country is clearly rotting from the head down.