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Prisoner Abuse

Just found this thanks to Josh Marshall via Toddo.

ICRC report on prisoner abuse

This is well worth the read. The report includes information on initial apprehension of prisoners, documentation and reporting of detention to families (or lack there of), methods of ill-treatment after initial capture, specifics of behavior at individual prisons, as well as other information relating to attempts made by the IIRC to correct the situation before issuing the report.

Sadly, none of this really surprises me and is consistent with what we’ve been seeing on the news of late. What it DOES tell me is that the administration’s (and particularly Secretary Rumsfeld’s) assertion that the images we’ve seen lately are isolated incidents by a few individuals is a blatant lie. Clearly the administration has done an unacceptable job of educating our forces on what acceptable behavior is even in times of war. Someone needs to start giving crash courses on the requirements of the Geneva convention as well as reminding them that the Nuremberg trials proved that they can’t use ‘I was given an order’ argument to absolve them of illegal and reprehensible actions. There is clearly something broken at a very high level for this kind of behavior to be going on.

Update: To be fair, there are definitely some sections in the document that, while definitely unfortunate, are potentially reasonable responses from the guards (shots fired during prison uprisings, etc). There are also portions of the requirments of the Geneva convention that, while definitely a goal that should be worked toward, would be difficult to implement (for example, how do you quickly get prisoners from their cells to air raid shelters in the event of shelling while maintaining order… not sure how you would do that).