Bush should face criminal probe over post-9/11 'torture,' report urges

The report says Bush approved waterboarding and authorized the CIA’s secret overseas detention and rendition programs. “Even after learning that serious abuses were taking place, Bush never intervened to stop them or seek to prosecute those responsible,” the report says.

Mr. Cheney is identified in the report as an architect of the detention and interrogation programs who pressed for the Justice Department to issue a legal justification of the controversial efforts. He was involved in discussions of specific interrogations, including Abu Zubaydah, who was waterboarded 83 times, the report says.

Mr. Rumsfeld allegedly “created the conditions for members of the US armed forces to commit torture and other war crimes by approving interrogation techniques that violated the Geneva Conventions and the Convention against Torture.” The report says he closely followed the interrogation of Mohammed al-Qahtani, the suspected 20th hijacker, through a six-week program of isolation, sleep deprivation, stress positions, threats from dogs, and sexual humiliation. At one point Mr. Qahtani was forced to perform tricks on a dog leash. The report says his weight dropped from 160 to about 100 pounds in four months.

As CIA director from 2001 to 2004, Mr. Tenet authorized and oversaw the CIA rendition, detention, and interrogation programs, including waterboarding, the report says.

In addition to a broad criminal investigation, Human Rights Watch seeks a public accounting of the preparation of the Justice Department interrogation memos, payment of fair compensation to those subjected to the harsh interrogation and rendition policies, and creation of a nonpartisan commission to examine the policies and make recommendations to prevent them from being enacted in the future.

Human Rights Watch is an independent organization that seeks to focus international attention on violations of human rights. Among the conclusions in its 107-page report, entitled "Getting Away with Torture: The Bush Administration and Mistreatment of Detainees,” are the following.

• “Human Rights Watch believes that there is sufficient basis for the US government to order a broad criminal investigation into alleged war crimes and human rights violations committed in connection with the torture and ill-treatment of detainees, the CIA secret detention program, and the rendition of detainees to torture…. Human Rights Watch presents evidence now publicly available, but expresses no opinion about the ultimate guilt or innocence of these or other officials.”

• “The CIA’s use of torture, enforced disappearance, and secret prisons was illegal, immoral, and counterproductive.”

• “President Barack Obama took important steps toward setting a new course when he abolished secret CIA prisons and banned the use of torture upon taking office in January 2009. But other measures have yet to be taken, such as ending the practice of indefinite detention without trial, closing the military detention facility at Guantanamo Bay and ending rendition of detainees to countries that practice torture.”

• “In the context of practices such as waterboarding, prolonged stress positions, and long-term incommunicado detention, it stretches credulity to argue that a person of ordinary sense and understanding would not know the practices were illegal.”

• “There is now substantial evidence that the initiative for abusive interrogation techniques came largely from civilian leaders, and that politically appointed administration lawyers created legal justification in the face of opposition from government legal officers.”

• “No US federal court, including the Supreme Court, has granted judicial remedy to persons alleging torture or other ill-treatment, including rendition to torture, in post-September 11 cases. Both the Bush and Obama administrations have argued successfully that such cases should be dismissed under the state secrets privilege in US law.”

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