Is No One Accountable?

Is No One Accountable?
By Bob Herbert
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article8391.htm

03/28/05 "New York Times" - - The Bush administration is desperately trying to
keep the full story from emerging. But there is no longer any doubt that
prisoners seized by the U.S. in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere have been
killed, tortured, sexually humiliated and otherwise grotesquely abused.

These atrocities have been carried out in an atmosphere in which administration
officials have routinely behaved as though they were above the law, and thus
accountable to no one. People have been rounded up, stripped, shackled, beaten,
incarcerated and in some cases killed, without being offered even the semblance
of due process. No charges. No lawyers. No appeals.

Arkan Mohammed Ali is a 26-year-old Iraqi who was detained by the U.S. military
for nearly a year at various locations, including the infamous Abu Ghraib
prison. According to a lawsuit filed against Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld,
Mr. Ali was at times beaten into unconsciousness during interrogations. He was
stabbed, shocked with an electrical device, urinated on and kept locked -
hooded and naked - in a wooden, coffinlike box. He said he was told by his
captors that soldiers could kill detainees with impunity.

(This was not a boast from the blue. On Saturday, for example, The Times
reported that the Army would not prosecute 17 American soldiers implicated in
the deaths of three prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan.)

Mr. Ali's story is depressingly similar to other accounts pouring in from
detainees, human rights groups, intelligence sources and U.S. government
investigators. If you pay close attention to what is already known about the
sadistic and barbaric treatment of prisoners by the U.S., you can begin to
wonder how far we've come from the Middle Ages. The alleged heretics hauled
before the Inquisition were not permitted to face their accusers or mount a
defense. Innocence was irrelevant. Torture was the preferred method of
obtaining confessions.

No charges were ever filed against Mr. Ali, and he was eventually released. But
what should be of paramount concern to Americans is this country's precipitous
and frightening descent into the hellish zone of lawlessness that the Bush
administration, on the one hand, is trying to conceal and, on the other, is
defending as absolutely essential to its fight against terror.

The lawsuit against Mr. Rumsfeld was filed by the American Civil Liberties
Union and Human Rights First, a New York-based group, on behalf of Mr. Ali and
seven other former detainees from Iraq and Afghanistan who claim to have been
tortured by U.S. personnel.

The suit charges that Mr. Rumsfeld personally authorized unlawful interrogation
techniques and abdicated his responsibility to stop the torture and other
abuses of prisoners in U.S. custody. It contends that the abuse of detainees
was widespread and that Mr. Rumsfeld and other top administration officials
were well aware of it.

According to the suit, it is unreasonable to believe that Mr. Rumsfeld could
have remained in the dark about the rampant mistreatment of prisoners in U.S.
custody. It cites a wealth of evidence readily available to the secretary,
including the scandalous eruptions at Abu Ghraib prison, the reports of
detainee abuse at Guantnamo Bay, myriad newspaper and magazine articles,
internal U.S. government reports, and concerns expressed by such reputable
groups as the International Committee of the Red Cross.

(The committee has noted, among other things, that military intelligence
estimates suggest that 70 percent to 90 percent of the people detained in Iraq
had been seized by mistake.)

Whether this suit will ultimately be successful in holding Mr. Rumsfeld
personally accountable is questionable. But if it is thoroughly argued in the
courts, it will raise yet another curtain on the stomach-turning practices that
have shamed the United States in the eyes of the world.

The primary aim of the lawsuit is quite simply to re-establish the rule of law.
"It's that fundamental idea that nobody is above the law," said Michael Posner,
executive director of Human Rights First. "The violations here were created by
policies that deliberately undermined the rule of law. That needs to be
challenged."

Lawlessness should never be an option for the United States. Once the rule of
law has been extinguished, you're left with an environment in which moral
degeneracy can flourish and a great nation can lose its soul.

-----------------------------------

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