War Criminals

The report of the Senate's Armed Services Committee into the treatment of detainees at Guantanamo and elsewhere does not call anyone a war criminal. I guess conventions prevented them from doing so. But reading the report certainly raises the question of why we have tolerated such people to run our country.

Start with the quote from General Petraeus that leads off the report.

“What sets us apart from our enemies in this fight… is how we behave. In everything we do, we must observe the standards and values that dictate that we treat noncombatants and detainees with dignity and respect. While we are warriors, we are also all human beings.”

Then, listen to former Navy General Counsel Mora.

“there are serving U.S. flag-rank officers who maintain that the first and second identifiable causes of U.S. combat deaths in Iraq – as judged by their effectiveness in recruiting insurgent fighters into combat – are, respectively the symbols of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.”

And the basic conclusion in the executive summary.

The abuse of detainees in U.S. custody cannot simply be attributed to the actions of “a few bad apples” acting on their own. The fact is that senior officials in the United States government solicited information on how to use aggressive techniques, redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorized their use against detainees. Those efforts damaged our ability to collect accurate intelligence that could save lives, strengthened the hand of our enemies, and compromised our moral authority.