December 26, 2004

When a Federal Bureau of Investigations officer says interrogations of Iraqi prisoners are too rough, that the techniques amount to "torture," you’d think somebody would listen.

Not in this White House, or at this Pentagon.

Since before the first prisoner was taken in Afghanistan, administration lawyers have looked for ways to skirt the restrictions on torture in the Geneva Conventions.

Years ago — as early as fall 2001 — White House attorneys began arguing that the Conventions’ prohibition against torture could legally be ignored. It looks as if they succeeded.

According to an FBI memo released Monday as part of a suit accusing the U.S. of condoning torture, military interrogators at Guantanamo and Iraq, some posing as FBI agents, beat and choked detainees and put lit cigarettes in their ears. The memos, still heavily redacted, emerged in an American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit to find out the extent of U.S. mistreatment of prisoners.

The drumbeat of disclosures since Abu Ghraib increasingly is casting doubt on administration claims that it won’t tolerate such abuse.

"On a couple of occasions," one of the FBI memos reads, "I entered interview rooms to find a detainee chained hand (and) foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food, or water. Most times they had urinated or defecated on themselves and had been left there for 18 (or) 24 hours or more. On one occasion, the air conditioning had been turned down so far and the temperature was so cold in the room, that the barefooted detainee was shaking with cold. ..."

Stories like that should appall Americans. But they probably come as no surprise. White House counsel — and attorney general nominee — Alberto Gonzales spent a great deal of time trying to justify similarly harsh interrogation techniques.

According to Newsweek magazine, in a Jan. 25, 2002, memo to Bush, Gonzales said the new war on terror "renders obsolete Geneva’s strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners."

The FBI memos repeatedly refer to an "Executive Order" — the existence of which the White House denies — as justification for the techniques military interrogators used in Guantanamo: "We have also instructed our personnel not to participate in interrogations by military personnel which might include techniques authorized by Executive Order but beyond the bounds of FBI practices," the top FBI official in Iraq, who is unnamed, said in a memo to officials in Washington.

According to Newsweek, earlier this year: "the president’s directive authorized the CIA to set up a series of secret detention facilities outside the United States, and to question those held in them with unprecedented harshness.

Washington then negotiated novel 'status of forces agreements’ with foreign governments for the secret sites. These agreements gave immunity not merely to U.S. government personnel but also to private contractors."

Is it any wonder, then, that U.S. interrogators now stand accused, by FBI agents no less, of torturing prisoners?

In recent news reports, a distinct whisper campaign is laying the blame for the abuse in the FBI memos squarely at the feet of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

He very well may deserve it. But considering that the White House worked to justify torture, as well as the departments of Justice and Defense, there’s plenty of blame left to go around.

An increasingly wobbly Rumsfeld looks like he’s being set up to take the fall for the military errors in Iraq, and for his own missteps. But it would be a terrible shame if in the rush to blame Rumsfeld, we missed the real culprits.