New Accounts of Torture by U.S. Troops ...hallenge the Bush administration's claim that military and civilian leadership did not play a role in abuses

Reuters AlertNet - New Accounts of Torture by U.S. Troops: "23 Sep 2005 22:05:31 GMT | Source: Human Rights Watch
...
... They contradict claims by the Bush administration that detainee abuses by U.S. forces abroad have been infrequent, exceptional and unrelated to policy.

"The administration demanded that soldiers extract information from detainees without telling them what was allowed and what was forbidden," said Tom Malinowski, Washington Director of Human Rights Watch. "Yet when abuses inevitably followed, the leadership blamed the soldiers in the field instead of taking responsibility."
...
The soldiers' accounts challenge the Bush administration's claim that military and civilian leadership did not play a role in abuses. The officer quoted in the report told Human Rights Watch that he believes the abuses he witnessed in Iraq and Afghanistan were caused in part by President Bush's 2002 decision not to apply Geneva Conventions protection to detainees captured in Afghanistan:

"[In Afghanistan,] I thought that the chain on command all the way up to the National Command Authority [President Bush and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld] had made it a policy that we were going to interrogate these guys harshly. . . . We knew where the Geneva Conventions drew the line, but then you get that confusion when the Sec Def [Secretary of Defense] and the President make that statement [that Geneva did not apply to detainees] . . . . Had I thought we were following the Geneva Conventions as an officer I would have investigated what was clearly a very suspicious situation."