White House Gutted Human Rights Law

White House counsel Alberto Gonzales's memo from January 2002 urged the Bush administration to make al Qaeda and Taliban detainees exempt from the Geneva Convention's statutes on the proper and legal treatment of prisoners. Gonzales was aware of the risks in sidestepping international human rights laws, but the Bush administration ignored these warnings and went forward with its unorthodox treatment of prisoners. This cavalier attitude toward human rights eventually set the stage for the abuses at Abu Ghraib and other U.S. detention facilities.

• The Bush administration ignored serious warnings about its decision to circumvent the Geneva Conventions and treat prisoners of war inhumanely. Secretary of State Colin Powell directly warned the White House in his own 2002 memo that gutting international law "will reverse over a century of U.S. policy and practice in supporting the Geneva Conventions and undermine the protections of the law of war for our troops; it has a high cost in terms of negative international reaction, with immediate adverse consequences for our conduct of foreign policy; it will undermine public support among critical allies, making military cooperation more difficult to sustain; and Europeans and others will likely have legal problems with extradition." Powell was ignored by the White House.
• The abuse of prisoners in Iraq is a direct result of the Bush administration's rejection of human rights law early on in the war on terrorism. President Bush set the stage for the Abu Ghraib torture scandal. By downplaying and ignoring at the start of the war on terrorism decades of U.S. support for humane treatment of prisoners, the nation's Commander in Chief created the context for the reprehensible treatment of prisoners later in Iraq. It was the president's decision to follow Gonzalez's advice in circumventing the Geneva Conventions, and the resulting failures fall squarely on his shoulders.
• The White House must show a sincere commitment to international human rights laws by taking immediate steps to correct matters in Iraq. The president must develop and implement a new system for the management of detainees in Iraqi prisons and build confidence among Iraqis by making transparent and significant changes in the operation of the prisons. He must make room for participation by Iraqis and the international community. Here at home, he must launch a genuinely independent inquiry to investigate this tragedy that will greatly reduce the chance that something like Abu Ghraib could ever happen again.

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