INVESTIGATE TORTURE

Anything Amnesty International says is catnip to conservatives, who leap at the chance to call the organization anti-American. The Bush administration Wednesday leapt to belittle Amnesty International Wednesday when the organization demanded reform at the U.S. prison camps at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and a broad independent investigation of torture there and elsewhere. But that is a wholly insufficient response to what its own military investigations show is torture. A more thorough investigation is more than warranted.

Start with the reform, not the one demanded by Amnesty International but by the U.S. Supreme Court, which told the administration last year that U.S. courts “have jurisdiction to consider challenges to the legality of the detention of foreign nationals captured abroad in connection with hostilities and incarcerated at Guantanamo Bay.” This administration has responded only minimally to this, much as Scott McClellan, the White House spokesman, did in response to the Amnesty International charges.

“I think the allegations are ridiculous and unsupported by the facts,” he said “The United States is leading the way when it comes to protecting human rights and promoting human dignity. We have liberated 50 million people in Iraq and Afghanistan.” This is a wonderful non sequitur – it argues that because the United States really does lead the way in some areas of human rights it is immune from committing violations of them.

Unfortunately, the documented violations at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo are matched by other U.S. military investigations that say otherwise. Take one telling case: In early November 2003, Abd Hamad Mawhoush, an Iraqi major general, turned himself in to U.S. military just outside Baghdad. Two weeks later he was dead from what the military first reported as natural causes. Further investigation showed he suffered prolonged beatings; an Army sergeant later described him having “bruising on the back of his hands. He had very severe bruising over his entire back. He complained of feet pain, and he had bruising on the bottoms of his feet. And he had bruising on the tops of his feet as well. …” But the beatings he received weren’t what killed him.

U.S. interrogators covered Mr. Mawhoush with a sleeping bag, wrapped with 20 feet of electrical wire and sat on him for hours while he was interrogated. During that time, according to a U.S. investigation, he suffocated. Four soldiers have been charged; all of them say they believe their commanders approved of their interrogation techniques.

Are they all lying, and are many other soldiers lying when they say higher-ups approved torture? Administration officials can’t say enough good things about the service members risking their lives in Iraq – these soldiers should not become the fall guys for commanders who have ordered torture. The only way to determine whether there was a pattern of torture, including through the rendition of prisoners to countries known to practice torture, that could only have come from above is through an independent investigation of the upper command structure.

The administration is playing for time in Guantanamo, hoping public fatigue will allow it the room to quietly solve what is a very difficult problem of what to do with many innocent people caught and kept for years. The larger issue of torture will not go away and should not. Congress has it within their power to act or its members can sit back and risk individual U.S. soldiers paying the price of following orders while those issuing the orders are untouched.