War Crimes
Thursday, December 23, 2004; Page A22
THANKS TO a lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union and other human
rights groups, thousands of pages of government documents released this
month have confirmed some of the painful truths about the abuse of foreign
detainees by the U.S. military and the CIA -- truths the Bush administration
implacably has refused to acknowledge. Since the publication of photographs
of abuse at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison in the spring the administration's
whitewashers -- led by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld -- have
contended that the crimes were carried out by a few low-ranking reservists,
that they were limited to the night shift during a few chaotic months at Abu
Ghraib in 2003, that they were unrelated to the interrogation of prisoners
and that no torture occurred at the Guantanamo Bay prison where hundreds of
terrorism suspects are held. The new documents establish beyond any doubt
that every part of this cover story is false.
Though they represent only part of the record that lies in
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A20986-2004Dec22