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Published on Wednesday, March 22, 2006 by the Boston Globe
Un-American Activities
Editorial
The more revelations there are of detainee abuse by US troops, the more evident it is that the guards who mistreated prisoners at Abu Ghraib were not just a few bad apples, as the Bush administration has described them. A New York Times report Sunday focused on a detention center at Baghdad airport where FBI, CIA, and civilian Department of Defense officials complained to their superiors about the harsh tactics, including beatings, used by military interrogators.
The public, in whose name this treatment is being inflicted, deserves to know the findings of the Pentagon inquiry on what happened at the airport. The public also has a right to know whether ranking officers are being held accountable, and, if not, why not.
The military could not ignore the Abu Ghraib abuses after soldiers who disapproved of what happened released photos of the activities to the media. The Bush administration then did its best to minimize Abu Ghraib as an isolated case and the work of untrained reservists. But the Baghdad airport center was staffed largely by highly trained Special Operations troops, with about 1,000 present at any time. According to the Times, 34 have been disciplined for mistreatment.
In late 2003, warnings of what was going on at the center came from medics who saw injuries on detainees that could have come from beatings. By 2004, relations between military and civilian officials were strained enough for reports to reach the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, Vice Admiral Lowell E. Jacoby. He informed the under secretary of defense for intelligence, Stephen Cambone, who instructed his deputy, Lieutenant General William Boykin, to ''get to the bottom of this immediately" and find out if the reported abuse was ''part of a pattern of behavior" at the center.
Boykin, who kept his Pentagon job despite having publicly disparaged the Islamic faith, concluded at the time there was no pattern of misconduct at the center.
Since then, there has been a broader inquiry into allegations of prisoner abuse by Special Operations forces. Completed in 2005 by Brigadier General Richard P. Formica, it was sent to Congress, but the Pentagon has refused to release even an unclassified version. Presumably, the report played a role in Congress's approval of Senator John McCain's anti-torture amendment, the one that President Bush undercut with a signing statement raising doubts about his willingness to abide by its ban on prisoner mistreatment.
The United States is paying for prisoner abuse in the animosity it engenders throughout the Mideast. And US soldiers will pay for it in future conflicts when they are captured and subjected to similar mistreatment. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has consistently been an apologist for and enabler of prisoner abuse. President Bush should order him to resign, and, as his last official act, release the Formica report.
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