5-02-06, 9:44 am

Contrary to claims made by President Bush and other administration officials in April 2004 that a 'few bad apples' were responsible for torture and prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib, a new report put out late last month shows that as many as 600 US military, intelligence, and civilian personnel were involved in potential war crimes.

According to 'By the Numbers,' a report published by the Detainee Abuse and Accountability Project, a jointly conducted project of the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice, Human Rights Watch and Human Rights First, the abuse of US-held prisoners is not confined to a handful of people at Abu Ghraib. Even more troublesome is the fact that the US government has taken few steps to punish seriously those involved, the report concludes. According to the findings, US military and intelligence people and civilian contractors who operated in prisons in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba have been involved in 'widespread' abuse. The project, altogether, collected allegations of torture and abuse since late 2001 that involve more than 600 US personal and more than 460 prisoners.

'Two years ago, US officials said the abuses at Abu Ghraib were aberrations and that people who abused detainees would be brought to justice,' Meg Satterthwaite of the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice said in a press release. 'Yet our research shows that detainee abuses were widespread, and few people have truly been brought to justice.' Out of concern that the US government appeared to be unwilling or unable to move quickly, thoroughly, and openly to investigate prisoner abuse, the three organizations mentioned above undertook the study. This project followed allegations of abuse and scrutinized US military investigations of them.

In conducting this study, the human rights groups documented over '330 cases in which US military and civilian personnel are credibly alleged to have abused, tortured or killed detainees.' Of the more than 600 people implicated in these cases, only 40 people have been sentenced to prison. The report finds that only about half of these 300 cases have been adequately investigated. In cases where military trials were held and defendants found guilty, only 10 people have been sentenced to a year or more in prison. And no officers have been punished using the military doctrine of 'command responsibility' for crimes committed under their watch.

Of the civilians implicated in the 330 cases, mainly CIA agents, none have been punished and of the 20 individuals referred to the Department of Justice for investigation, only a single non-CIA civilian contractor has been indicted.

In most cases, the report finds, punishments have been excessively light. In the case of an Army enlisted person who staged a 'mock execution' of a prisoner, during which he beat the prisoner with his weapon and then forced a pistol into the prisoner’s mouth, the military’s investigation unit ordered a non-judicial hearing and punished the soldier with 'two months of extra duty, restriction to base, reduction of rank, and a fine.'

In another case documented in the report, three soldiers found culpable of sexually assaulting a female prisoner and parading her nude in front of male prisoners in order to get her and others to 'cooperate' were subject to confinement to living quarters and fines equal to less than one month’s pay.

In at least two cases of the homicide of prisoners at Abu Ghraib and US prison facilities in Afghanistan, soldiers and sailors found to be responsible were given non-judicial punishments amounting to discharge from service in the most extreme cases.

'We’ve seen a series of half-hearted investigations and slaps on the wrist,' said Tom Malinowski of Human Rights Watch. 'The government seems more interested in managing the detainee abuse scandal than in addressing the underlying problems that caused it.'

The briefing paper did not address the role of the Bush administration, the Pentagon or the Department of Justice in creating the conditions that allowed widespread abuse and torture of prisoners. In 2002, the administration proclaimed that it was not obligated follow international agreements such as the Geneva Conventions with regard prisoners captured in the 'war on terror.'

Following this claim, in 2003, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld ordered an expansion of interrogation techniques later found by human rights organizations and other sections of the government to be in violation of international law. Also in 2003, the Department of Justice prepared an extensive, if faulty, legal argument claiming the right to set aside its obligations under international agreements to prevent torture and abuse.

The Detainee Abuse and Accountability Project report recommended congressional investigations into the interrogation policies ordered by the Pentagon and the Bush administration. It also recommended specific actions to move forward with investigations, to make sure those found guilty are held responsible in an appropriate manner regardless of rank. Officers held to bear 'command responsibility' should also be punished.

So far, these recommendations have fallen on deaf ears.



--Joel Wendland is managing editor of Political Affairs and can be reached at