Major General Anthony Taguba, who was forced into retirement after his 2004 report on prisoner abuses at Abu Ghraib, has re-entered the charged national and international debate over U.S. treatment of detainees with stiff new charges that the Bush Administration has repeatedly engaged in war crimes.
The general’s new charges appear in a preface to Broken Laws, Broken Lives, a report released Wednesday by Physicians for Human Rights. According to the Associated Press, the new PHR report is the most extensive medical study of former U.S. detainees yet conducted
and finds “evidence of torture and other abuse that resulted in serious injuries and mental disorders.”
The report and Taguba’s blunt and sweeping charges come the same week as a remarkable new investigative series by McClatchy newspapers is delivering fresh evidence that the abuse of detainees was conducted in accordance with a framework established by a handful of lawyers working out of the White House, the Pentagon and the Justice Department.
Taguba writes in his preface: “This report tells the largely untold story of what happened to detainees in our custody when the Commander-in-chief and those under him authorized a systematic regime of torture. This story is not only written in words: It is scrawled for the rest of these individuals’ lives on their bodies and minds. Our national honor is stained by the indignity and inhumane treatment these men received from their captors.
“The profiles of these eleven former detainees, none of whom were ever charged with a crime or told why they were detained, are tragic and brutal rebuttals to those who claim that torture is ever justified. Through the experiences of these men in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo Bay, we can see the full scope of the damage this illegal and unsound policy has inflicted–both on America’s institutions and our nation’s founding values, which the military, intelligence services, and our justice system are duty-bound to defend.
“In order for these individuals to suffer the wanton cruelty to which they were subjected, a government policy was promulgated to the field whereby the Geneva Conventions and the Uniform Code of Military Service were disregarded. The UN Convention Against Torture was indiscriminately ignored. And the healing professions, including physicians and psychologists, became complicit in the willful infliction of harm against those the Hippocratic Oath demands they protect.
“After years of disclosures by government investigations, media accounts, and reports from human rights organizations, there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes. The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account.”
Next Wednesday will mark the first anniversary of Pulitzer-prize winning investigative reporter Seymour Hersh’s dramatic profile of Taguba in the New Yorker magazine, in which the general described the no-win situation he found himself in once he concluded that detainees at Abu Ghraib had been subjected to “systemic and illegal” abuse.
