Thursday, March 03, 2005

War Crimes R Us

CIA Avoids Scrutiny of Detainee Treatment (washingtonpost.com)
Well, maybe the Washington Post can shame the Republican senators into investigating this kind of stuff:
"In November 2002, a newly minted CIA case officer in charge of a secret prison just north of Kabul allegedly ordered guards to strip naked an uncooperative young Afghan detainee, chain him to the concrete floor and leave him there overnight without blankets, according to four U.S. government officials aware of the case. The Afghan guards -- paid by the CIA and working under CIA supervision in an abandoned warehouse code-named the Salt Pit -- dragged their captive around on the concrete floor, bruising and scraping his skin, before putting him in his cell, two of the officials said.
As night fell, so, predictably, did the temperature.
By morning, the Afghan man had frozen to death.
After a quick autopsy by a CIA medic -- "hypothermia" was listed as the cause of death -- the guards buried the Afghan, who was in his twenties, in an unmarked, unacknowledged cemetery used by Afghan forces, officials said. The captive's family has never been notified; his remains have never been returned for burial. He is on no one's registry of captives, not even as a "ghost detainee," the term for CIA captives held in military prisons but not registered on the books, they said. "He just disappeared from the face of the earth," said one U.S. government official with knowledge of the case."

Or maybe not -- after all, they're awfully busy passing bills to make it harder for people bankrupted by medical costs to declare bankruptcy, and trying to sell the destruction of their social security system to a skeptical public. They don't really have the time or the interest to investigate what their own employees are doing in the name of the United States government.
As the stories continue to emerge, it becomes clearer exactly WHY the CIA wanted then-White House counsel Alberto Gonzales to give them legal cover for torture. And why Bush pulled the US out of the International Court in December of 2002.

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