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Superior officers were cleared of wrongdoing or received mild reprimands.
But the February 2004 ICRC report on Iraq took on added meaning with the disclosure of another ICRC report, dated Feb. 14, 2007. Based on interviews that the ICRC finally arranged with 14 "high-value" detainees held at secret CIA prisons, the report concluded those prisoners had been subjected to similar humiliating and abusive treatment, including forced nudity and stress positions, as well as the drowning sensation of waterboarding.
The ICRC concluded that the treatment "constituted torture," a finding that has legal weight because the ICRC is responsible for ensuring compliance with the Geneva Conventions and supervising the treatment of prisoners of war.
Taken together, the two reports suggest that the Bush administration adopted a policy of torture against "high-value" detainees captured in 2002 and that the policy spread to Iraq in 2003 when U.S. forces were grappling with a rising Iraqi insurgency against the American occupation.
A recently declassified Senate Armed Services Committee report reached a similar conclusion, tracing the U.S. abuse of detainees at Guantanamo Bay and later Abu Ghraib to Bush's Feb. 7, 2002, action memorandum that excluded "war on terror"- suspects from Geneva Convention protections.
The report said Bush's memo opened the door to "considering aggressive techniques," which were then developed with the complicity of then-Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, Bush's National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and other senior officials.
The public record--as it now exists--also makes clear that the Bush administration had a selective view of international law. When it worked to American advantage--as when Iraqis videotaped captured U.S. soldiers in March 2003--Bush and his aides saw the rules as binding, but not when the laws of war constrained their own behavior.
After Iraqi troops captured several U.S. soldiers and let them be interviewed on Iraqi TV, senior Bush administration officials expressed outrage over this violation of the Geneva Convention.
"If there is somebody captured," Bush told reporters on March 23, 2003, "I expect those people to be treated humanely. If not, the people who mistreat the prisoners will be treated as war criminals."
No one in the Bush administration, however, acknowledged the extent of their own violations of rules governing humane treatment of enemy combatants. Nor did the U.S. news media offer any context, ignoring the U.S. handling of Afghan War captives at Guantanamo Bay in 2002 and the fact that the U.S. military also had paraded captured Iraqi soldiers before cameras.
During those heady days of "embedded" war correspondents reporting excitedly about Bush's "shock and awe" invasion, what Americans got to see and hear was how the Iraqi violation of the Geneva Convention--the videotaped interviews--demonstrated the barbarity of the enemy and justified their punishment as war criminals.
Bush's fury over the POW interviews echoed across Washington. "It is a blatant violation of the Geneva Convention to humiliate and abuse prisoners of war or to harm them in any way," declared Pentagon spokeswoman Victoria Clarke on March 24.
That same day, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz told the BBC, "The Geneva Convention is very clear on the rules for treating prisoners. They're not supposed to be tortured or abused, they're not supposed to be intimidated, they're not supposed to be made public displays of humiliation or insult, and we're going to be in a position to hold those Iraqi officials who are mistreating our prisoners accountable, and they've got to stop."
On March 25, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld added, "In recent days, the world has witnessed further evidence of their [Iraqi] brutality and their disregard for the laws of war. Their treatment of coalition POWs is a violation of the Geneva Conventions."
In other words, international law applied to the other guy, but not to Bush. He surely didn't mean to implicate himself when he declared "the people who mistreat the prisoners will be treated as war criminals."
