Human Right Watch: Prison Abuse Panel Doesn’t Go Far Enough

[Jack Rabbit]

Press release from Human Rights Watch
Dateline Washington, Tuesday August 24

U.S.: Prison Abuse Panel Doesn’t Go Far Enough
Independent 9/11-style Commission Needed

A report by a panel reviewing Pentagon detention operations criticizes top officials, but fails to address government policy that may have led to the mistreatment and torture of detainees, Human Rights Watch said today.

The four-member panel, named by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, was headed by former Defense Secretary James Schlesinger. It faulted Rumsfeld, as well as top military officials, for "errors of omission" in failing to adapt detention operations to changing conditions, and singled out Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, then the top U.S. commander in Iraq, for establishing a “confused command relationship” that contributed to the abuses.

"The report talks about management failures when it should be talking about policy failures," said Reed Brody, Special Counsel with Human Rights Watch. "The report seems to go out of its way not to find any relationship between Secretary Rumsfeld's approval of interrogation techniques designed to inflict pain and humiliation and the widespread mistreatment and torture of detainees in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo."

The report focuses on the actions of the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade and the 800th Military Police Brigade, which operated in Abu Ghraib. It fails, however, to examine in detail other detention facilities in Iraq and Afghanistan, even though most deaths of detainees in U.S. custody and many reported abuses occurred outside Abu Ghraib.

The report acknowledges that "augmented" interrogations techniques for Guantanamo Bay, which included the use of dogs, stripping detainees naked, and subjecting them to painful stress positions, "migrated to Afghanistan and Iraq where they were neither limited nor safeguarded" and accepts that these techniques went beyond what was permitted by the Army’s traditional interrogation guidelines. It also confirms that following a visit to Iraq by General Geoffrey Miller, General Sanchez approved such techniques, including specifically the use of dogs, to aid interrogations. Yet the panel does not state that any of these techniques were inherently abusive or unlawful and does not hold the officials and general officers who approved them responsible for abuses.

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