Harsh methods detailed in memos signed by Rummey

[merh]

The Washington Post
Editorial

A Partial Disclosure
Thursday, June 24, 2004; Page A24

THE BUSH administration has taken two important steps toward correcting its policies on the handling of foreign detainees. On Tuesday administration officials renounced earlier legal opinions that justified the use of torture, and President Bush stated that the United States will not condone its use. At the same time, the Defense Department released its current procedures for prisoner interrogation at Guantanamo Bay, where the administration considers itself unbound by the Geneva Conventions. Both the revised procedures and the administration's statements about them give some cause for concern, and many important questions remain unanswered. But President Bush deserves credit for accepting that some administration policymaking was, as his counsel put it, "controversial" and "subject to misinterpretation," and for breaking with a self-defeating policy of secrecy about the rules for interrogation.

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Questions also remain about how the abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison and elsewhere came about. The documents confirm that Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld approved a number of harsh interrogation techniques for use in Guantanamo in December 2002, including hooding, requiring nudity, placing prisoners in stress positions and using dogs. After military lawyers objected that these violated international law, Mr. Rumsfeld suspended their use a month later. But all these techniques, as well as the restricted practices now approved for Guantanamo, appeared in an interrogation policy issued for Iraq by command of Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez in September 2003. Nearly word for word, the harsh methods detailed in memos signed by Mr. Rumsfeld -- which even administration lawyers considered violations of the Geneva Conventions -- were then distributed to interrogators at Abu Ghraib. The procedures in turn could be read to cover much of what is seen in the photographs that have scandalized the world. How did this spread of improper and illegal practices occur? The Bush administration has yet to offer a convincing answer -- or hold anyone accountable for it.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A1005-2004Jun23.html


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Yet to offer a convincing answer or hold anyone accountable for it.

[merh]

1. No convincing answer ......

The procedures in turn could be read to cover much of what is seen in the photographs that have scandalized the world. How did this spread of improper and illegal practices occur? The Bush administration has yet to offer a convincing answer -- or hold anyone accountable for it.