It is time for Donald Rumsfeld to step down....

[whistle]

...and for the Justice Department to throw his ass in jail!

Rumsfeld's Dirty War on Terror
The Guardian U.K.

Monday 13 September 2004

In an explosive extract from his new book, Seymour Hersh reveals how, in a fateful decision that led to the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison, the US defence secretary gave the green light to a secret unit authorised to torture terrorist suspects.

In the late summer of 2002, a CIA analyst made a quiet visit to the detention centre at the US Naval Base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, where an estimated 600 prisoners were being held, many, at first, in steel-mesh cages that provided little protection from the brutally hot sun. Most had been captured on the battlefield in Afghanistan during the campaign against the Taliban and al-Qaida.

The Bush administration had determined, however, that they were not prisoners of war but "enemy combatants", and that their stay at Guantánamo could be indefinite, as teams of CIA, FBI, and military interrogators sought to prise intelligence from them. In a series of secret memorandums written earlier in the year, lawyers for the White House, the Pentagon and the justice department had agreed that the prisoners had no rights under federal law or the Geneva convention. President Bush endorsed the finding, while declaring that the al-Qaida and Taliban detainees were nevertheless to be treated in a manner consistent with the principles of the Geneva convention - as long as such treatment was also "consistent with military necessity".

But the interrogations at Guantánamo were a bust. Very little useful intelligence had been gathered, while prisoners from around the world continued to flow into the base, and the facility constantly expanded. The CIA analyst had been sent there to find out what was going wrong. He was fluent in Arabic and familiar with the Islamic world. He was held in high respect within the agency, and was capable of reporting directly, if he chose, to George Tenet, the CIA director. The analyst did more than just visit and inspect. He interviewed at least 30 prisoners to find out who they were and how they ended up in Guantánamo. Some of his findings, he later confided to a former CIA colleague, were devastating.

EDITED BY ADMIN: COPYRIGHT

<link> http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/091404A.shtml

[Myrina]

1. 3 paragraph copyright guideline ?

I thought we are only supposed to snip a max of 3 paragraphs of an article and then cite the link ?

:shrug:

Thanks ~

[olddem43]

2. This is wrong - the time was long ago.

[Moderator]

3. whistle

Per DU copyright rules
please post only four
paragraphs from the
copyrighted news source
and provide a link to
the source.


Thank you.

DU Moderator