Antonio Taguba, who led the Army’s investigation into the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal, accused the Bush Administration of war crimes yesterday. He made that charge in a preface to a report by the Physicians for Human Rights, a group that examined men released from U.S. jails in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay. CNN says the 121-page report called "Broken Laws, Broken Lives "uncovered medical evidence of torture, including beatings, electric shock, sleep deprivation, sexual humiliation, sodomy and scores of other abuses."Taguba wrote:
"This report tells the largely untold human story of what happened to detainees in our custody when the Commander-in-Chief and those under him authorized a systematic regime of torture….After years of disclosures by government investigations, media accounts and reports from human rights organizations, there is no longer 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.”
That’s quite a bombshell. To their discredit, major media such as the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and USA Today ignored Taguba’s charge. Have they become so numb to the outrages committed on behalf of the “war on terror?”
As Taguba wrote:
“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.”
Don’t those founding values mean anything these days?