The Defense Department’s most recent investigation into the widespread torture and abuse of detainees in U.S. custody “reveals an ongoing unwillingness by the civilian leadership of the military to examine the full scope of the problem or assign responsibility for what went wrong in order to prevent further abuse,” said Michael Posner, Executive Director of Human Rights First.
Posner’s remarks followed testimony on March 10 by Vice Adm. Albert T. Church III, the author of the latest report, before the Senate Armed Services Committee on the effect of U.S. interrogation operations. Church described the development of U.S. interrogation policy in which senior Defense Department officials ignored concerns expressed by military lawyers regarding the legality of certain interrogation techniques, failed to “react to early warning signs of abuse,” and provided inadequate guidance to troops on the ground in Afghanistan and Iraq. Under questioning by senators, Church indicated that in developing interrogation policy at Guantanamo Bay, Defense Department General Counsel William Haynes prevented military lawyers from applying their own analysis of domestic and international law, and insisted that the military lawyers rely entirely on legal analysis by the Department of Justice, set forth in a previously undisclosed March 2003 memo from Assistant Attorney General John Yoo.
While these findings help shed further light on policy failures that led to hundreds of cases of abuse and torture in Afghanistan, Iraq and beyond, substantial gaps in the investigations to date remain – gaps that make it difficult to identify who bears responsibility for the widespread torture and abuse, and make it impossible to ensure that such abuse never happens again. For example, in the course of his ten-month review of detainee interrogations, Church never interviewed a detainee or other key officials connected to detainee interrogations. Likewise, as with previous investigations, the CIA did not provide Church any information regarding its activity in Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay or elsewhere.
“The gaps in the Church Report underscore the need for an independent investigation into our nation’s policy on treatment of detainees,” said Posner. Human Rights First last fall prepared a comprehensive report identifying gaps in the major investigations to date charting detainee abuse. Among the gaps identified then were narrowly circumscribed investigative mandates (preventing investigators from looking at the interaction between the Defense Department and other government agencies), contradictory conclusions reached by different investigations, questionable use of security classifications to avoid full inquiries into events and their consequences, and a failure to look at what responsibility command may bear for the abuses that occurred. “The latest offering by the Defense Department fails to address those gaps or ask the hard questions about ultimate responsibility. Now is the time for Congress to address these failures.”
The release of the long-delayed Church Report comes one week after Human Rights First and senior retired military leaders filed a lawsuit against Secretary Rumsfeld on behalf of detainees abused in Iraq and Afghanistan alleging that Rumsfeld bears command responsibility for failing to stop the abuses that occurred.
Read about the case against Rumsfeld:
http://www.humanrightsfirst.org/us_law/etn/lawsuit/index.asp
Read our report about previous investigations: http://www.humanrightsfirst.org/us_law/PDF/detainees/
Getting_to_Ground_Truth_090804.pdf
Read the Church Report Executive Summary:
http://www.defenselink.mil/news/Mar2005/d20050310exe.pdf
