Accounting for Torture

One of the great mysteries in the "war on terror" is why so few people have been held responsible for torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment inflicted on prisoners since 9/11. So much detail about so much abuse in so many places has now emerged that one cannot help concluding that the problem is systemic. There have been reports of burning cigarettes being placed in suspects' ears, waterboarding, men being shackled naked to cold floors so long that they urinate and defecate on themselves, mock burials and actual homicides. These abuses have reportedly taken place at Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib, Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan, undisclosed CIA detention centers and, with US concurrence, in foreign prisons to which we have "rendered" suspects on a CIA plane. Memos have been leaked linking these practices to policies developed at the highest levels of the Justice Department and the Pentagon. Yet there has been no accountability.

The Bush Administration and Congress have steadfastly refused to appoint any sort of independent commission or counsel to investigate the issue. The only official investigations are being handled by the Justice Department, the CIA and the Pentagon, the three entities most implicated in the practices. We spent $73 million investigating President Clinton's affair with a White House intern and Whitewater, but we are unwilling even to empower an unbiased investigator to look into widespread allegations of torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of hundreds of prisoners.

It is a federal crime to inflict torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment on detainees during wartime. But the prosecutor would have to be a US Attorney, and they are all ultimately answerable to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, the man who dismissed the Geneva Conventions as "quaint" and called for the now-infamous August 2002 Justice Department memo that effectively sought to legalize torture.

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