"End Corporate Rule"
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Oct 27, 2004, 2:40 PM
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Amnesty International Condemns Bush Administration for Torture
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The worst indictment of the Bush administration yet:
--quote
Amnesty Condemns U.S. for War on Terror Torture
Wed Oct 27, 2004 08:36 AM ET
By Kate Kelland
LONDON (Reuters) - The United States has failed to guard against torture and
inhuman behavior since launching its "war on terror" after Sept. 11, 2001,
Amnesty International said Wednesday in a report just days before the U.S.
election.
The rights group called on President Bush and his Democratic challenger John
Kerry to promise to take prompt action to address the issue head on if
elected on Nov. 2.
It condemned Bush's response to the 2001 attacks on U.S. cities, saying it
had resulted in an "iconography of torture, cruelty and degradation."
Amnesty's report accused Washington of stepping onto a "well-trodden path of
violating basic rights in the name of national security or 'military
necessity'."
"The war mentality the government has adopted has not been matched with a
commitment to the laws of war and it has discarded fundamental human rights
principles along the way," it said.
At best, Washington was guilty of setting conditions for torture and cruel
treatment by lowering safeguards and failing to respond adequately to
allegations of abuse, it said.
At worst, it had authorized interrogation techniques which flouted its
international obligation to reject torture and ill-treatment under any
circumstances.
HAUNTING IMAGES
An army general acknowledged for the first time in August that U.S. troops
tortured prisoners at Abu Ghraib jail in Iraq.
Pentagon leaders and Bush's officials had previously steered clear of
describing the physical abuse and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners as
torture.
Photographs published in April showed U.S. soldiers posing and smiling as
naked, male Iraqi prisoners were stacked in a pyramid or positioned to
simulate sex acts with one another.
One prisoner was standing on a box with his head hooded and wires attached
to his hands. He had been told he would be electrocuted if he fell off the
box.
Amnesty said the U.S. and the world would be "haunted by these and other
images for years to come." They were "icons of a government's failure to put
human rights at its heart."
The report -- "Human dignity denied: Torture and accountability in the 'war
on terror"' -- urged Bush and Kerry to commit to opening an independent
inquiry into all U.S. interrogation and detention policies.
"The core message of this report is that the prevention of torture and
cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment is primarily a matter of political
will," it said.
Amnesty also criticized a tendency in the U.S. to gloss over aspects of war
and violence -- referring to torture and degrading treatment as "stress and
duress" for example -- which it said threatened to promote tolerance of
them.
"The human rights violations which the U.S. government has been so reluctant
to call torture when committed by its own agents are annually described as
such by the State Department when they occur in other countries," the report
said.
"Double standards have greatly undermined the credibility of the U.S.'s
global discourse on human rights," it said.
--end quote
The U.S. will see Abu Ghraib's angry harvest for decades to come.
end corporate rule
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