A narrow brush with justice

Former US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has been forced to flee France in order to avoid prosecution for torture over his authorising the torture of suspected terrorists [PDF], and his personally supervising the torture of Mohamed al-Kahtani in Guantanamo Bay. Obviously I'd prefer it if he'd been arrested, tried, and jailed, but even this narrow brush with justice should be a warning to current and former Bush administration officials involved in establishing the policy of torture. Like Kissinger and Pinochet, they will have to be very careful about where they travel to in future - because if they go to any country which is a signatory to the Convention Against Torture (which is pretty much everywhere), they will be facing arrest, trial, and punishment.

Simply delusional

It's been a long-standing joke about Iraq that the NeoCon cabal which drove the US to war - Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Cheney and friends - believed that US troops would be greeted as liberators, and that the postwar phase would consist solely of a victory parade through baghdad, in which smiling Iraqi children would shower victorious US troops with flowers and rosewater. However, it's not so funny when you realise that the US military believed it too. The National Security Archive - a US research institute which explores national security issues - has obtained prewar briefings which lay out the plan for the postwar occupation of Iraq. And according to the plan laid out in August 2002, the US expected to have only 5,000 soldiers in Iraq today.

The National Security Archive calls this "delusional" - and they're right. Among the assumptions which underlay the plan were that a credible provisional government would be in place on the day of the invasion, that Iraqi troops would stay in their barracks rather than fighting, and that the only tasks facing the US after Saddam had been toppled were to "gather intelligence, detain terrorists and war criminals, [and] free individuals unjustly detained". They couldn't have got it more wrong - and over 3,100 US troops and 655,000 Iraqis have died as a result.

Justice for torture

For a while I've been suggesting that Donald Rumsfeld could be sued or even prosecuted in the US for authorising interrogation techniques which are tantamount to torture. Now, someone is finally doing it. Rumsfeld is being sued in his home state of Illinois, by the ACLU and Human Rights First, who are acting on behalf of eight Iraqi and Afghan detainees who were

...incarcerated in U.S. detention facilities in Iraq and Afghanistan, where they were subjected to torture and other cruel and degrading treatment, including severe and repeated beatings, cutting with knives, sexual humiliation and assault, mock executions, death threats, and restraint in contorted and excruciating positions. None of the men were ever charged with a crime. All have been released.

Rumsfeld is being held responsible for this because he

"authorized an abandonment of our nation's inviolable and deep-rooted prohibition against torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment of detainees in U.S. military custody." The complaint further charges that brutal and illegal interrogation techniques were personally approved by Secretary Rumsfeld in December 2002. Those techniques included the use of "stress positions," 20-hour interrogations, the removal of clothing, the use of dogs, isolation, and sensory deprivation.

Although some of these techniques were later rescinded, Rumsfeld personally approved a new list in April 2003, which included dietary manipulation, sensory deprivation and "false flag" (leading detainees to believe that they have been transferred to a country that permits torture). He also made clear that harsher techniques could be used with his personal authorization.

[Links added in so you can see the documentary trail. It's particularly chilling that the initial request included techniques such as "use of a wet towel and dripping water to induce the misperception of suffocation" (the "dry submarine" - a form of waterboarding) and "[convincing] the detainee that death or severely painful consequences are imminent for him and/or his family". The latter is explicitly defined as torture in the US anti-torture statute.]

A secondary part of the complaint is based on the principle of command responsibility: even if he didn't directly order the abuses or establish a policy framework which encouraged them, Rumsfeld is still responsible for actions carried out by US soldiers if he knew or should have known about them and failed to prevent or punish them.

Similar cases have also been filed in other states against several US Army officers, including Lt. General Ricardo Sanchez, on behalf of other torture victims. Sanchez is in a similar situation to Rumsfeld, in that he personally authorised dubious interrogation techniques, not to mention hiding prisoners from the Red Cross. The other cases are more reliant on command responsibility.

These are going to be very interesting cases which will test the US's commitment to the rule of law. But while it's a first go at justice, these are only civil suits. If the actions or inactions of these officials violate US law, then they should not just be facing bankruptcy, but a prison cell.