Rumsfeld blamed in detainee abuse scandals
A bipartisan Senate report calls decisions made by the former Defense secretary a 'direct cause' of inhumane treatment of prisoners of war. Other Bush officials also are faulted.
Reporting from Washington — A bipartisan Senate report released Thursday concluded that decisions made by former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld were a "direct cause" of widespread detainee abuses, and that other Bush administration officials were to blame for creating a legal and moral climate that contributed to inhumane treatment.
The report, which was endorsed by Democrats and Republicans on the Senate Armed Services Committee, is the most forceful denunciation to date of the role that Rumsfeld and other top officials played in the prisoner abuse scandals of the last five years.
In several of its findings, the document also challenged the frequent assertions of senior Bush administration officials that the most egregious cases of prisoner mistreatment were isolated incidents of appalling conduct by U.S. troops.
"The abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib in late 2003 was not simply the result of a few soldiers acting on their own," the document said. Instead, it said, a series of high-level decisions in the Bush administration "conveyed the message that physical pressures and degradation were appropriate treatment for detainees in U.S. military custody."
The document aimed its harshest criticism at Rumsfeld's decision in December 2002 to authorize the use of aggressive interrogation techniques at the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Although it was rescinded six weeks later, the report described the Rumsfeld order as "a direct cause for detainee abuse" at Guantanamo Bay, and concluded that it "influenced and contributed to the use of abusive techniques, including military working dogs, forced nudity and stress positions, in Afghanistan and Iraq."
The report also criticized President Bush, although less harshly. In particular, it cited a presidential memorandum signed Feb. 7, 2002 that denied detainees captured in Afghanistan the protections of the Geneva Conventions, which ban abusive treatment of prisoners of war.
Bush's decision to bypass an international law that had been observed by U.S. troops for decades sent a message that "impacted the treatment of detainees in U.S. custody," the report said.
That message was bolstered by a series of legal memos from the Justice Department, the report said, that "distorted the meaning and intent of anti-torture laws" and "rationalized the abuse of detainees in U.S. custody."
