William Fisher

NEW YORK, Apr 25 2005 (IPS) — A leading human rights group demands that the U.S. government launch a sweeping inquiry into the torture of Iraqi and other prisoners by U.S. troops, and that it name a special prosecutor to probe high-ranking officials’ possible role in alleged abuses.

Human Rights Watch, in a new report assailing some conclusions of previous investigations, said ”a wall of impunity surrounds the architects of the policies responsible for the larger pattern of abuses.”

”Evidence is mounting that high-ranking US civilian and military leaders – including Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, former CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) Director George Tenet, Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, formerly the top U.S. commander in Iraq, and Major General Geoffrey Miller, the former commander of the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba – made decisions and issued policies that facilitated serious and widespread violations of the law,” it added.

The U.S. Army announced last week it had cleared Sanchez of all alleged wrongdoing stemming from abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. The Pentagon has said that Rumsfeld, the target of lawsuits alleging his culpability in torture, did not authorize or condone any abuse.

Even so, HRW urged U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to ”appoint a special counsel to investigate any U.S. officials – no matter their rank or position – who participated in, ordered, or had command responsibility for war crimes or torture, or other prohibited ill-treatment against detainees in U.S. custody.”

The doctrine of command responsibility holds superiors responsible for crimes committed by subordinates when the superiors knew or should have known that they were being committed but failed to take reasonable measures to stop them. HRW said there was strong circumstantial evidence that such was the case and that senior officials were subsequently presented with evidence of abuse but failed to act to stem it.

HRW asked that the investigations be kept out of the hands of the Justice Department because Gonzales also played a role in approving interrogation techniques that appeared to violate international law.

Gonzales, ”who, as head of the Department of Justice, sits atop the prosecutorial machinery, was himself deeply involved in the policies leading to these alleged crimes, and thus may not only have a conflict of interest but also he, himself, may have a degree of complicity in those abuses,” the group said.

Rumsfeld, it added, ”sits atop the military justice system, thus all but ruling out accountability though that channel for policies he set in motion.”

Justice Department regulations call for the appointment of a special counsel when a conflict exists and the public interest warrants a prosecutor from outside the government.

HRW also recommended that Congress create a special commission, along the lines of the 9/11 Commission, to investigate prisoner abuse. ”Such a commission would hold hearings, have full subpoena power, and be empowered to recommend the creation of a special prosecutor to investigate possible criminal offenses, if the Attorney General had not yet named one,” HRW said.

It said a special commission ”could compel evidence that the government has continued to conceal, including President (George W) Bush’s reported authorization for the CIA to set up secret detention facilities and to ‘render’ suspects to other countries, and details on Secretary Rumsfeld’s role in the chain of events leading to the worst period of abuses at Abu Ghraib.”

HRW charged Rumsfeld and other senior U.S. officials approved coercive methods including the use of dogs to intimidate prisoners, forced nudity, and shackling in painful positions. Initially intended for use at the U.S. detention center in Guantanamo, Cuba, these techniques then were applied without restraint in Afghanistan and Iraq, the group said. Washington, it added, was accustomed to condemning such practices as barbarity and torture when applied by others.

It further condemned the disappearance of detainees while in U.S. custody and the ongoing, prolonged incommunicado holding of al-Qaeda suspects in secret locations.

The HRW report criticised the practice of ‘rendition,’ in which as many as 150 detainees have been sent by U.S. agents for detention and interrogation by governments said by the State Department to practice torture routinely.

The watchdog group also assailed U.S. efforts to hold torturers accountable.

”Officials have denounced the most egregious abuses, rhetorically reaffirmed the U.S. commitment to uphold the law and respect human rights, and belatedly opened a number of prosecutions for crimes committed against detainees in Afghanistan and Iraq. To date, however, with the exception of one major personally implicated in abuse, only low-ranking soldiers – privates and sergeants – have been called to account,” it said.

HRW acknowledged that the Pentagon had established at least seven investigations in the wake of Abu Ghraib but said none had the independence or the breadth to get to the bottom of the prisoner-abuse issue.

The probes were flawed in three fundamental ways, the group said: First, in all but one case, the military investigated itself. Second, they were of limited scope. None examined the role of civilian leaders who might have had ultimate authority over detainee treatment policy and none looked at renditions. The CIA reportedly has launched internal investigations but no details have been made public. And third, the investigations effectively defined detainee abuse as any treatment not approved by higher authorities.

”To the Pentagon’s investigators, treatment that followed approved policies and techniques could not, by definition, have been torture. With this logical sleight of hand, they thus rendered themselves incapable of finding any connections between policies approved by senior officials and acts of abuse in the field. But that does not mean such connections did not exist,” HRW said.

U.S. rights groups also have sought to launch criminal investigations of senior U.S. officials overseas.

The president of one such group, the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights, endorsed HRW’s call for a special counsel.

”There is a conspiracy to cover up torture by the very officials who approved and aided and abetted torture,” Michael Ratner told IPS.