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The Torture Papers: The Road to Abu Ghraib

• Title - The Torture Papers: The Road to Abu Ghraib
  • Author - Karen Greenberg
  • Category - nonfiction
  • 
  • Queue status - completed

• Karen Greenberg

Synopsis

This is 1200 pages of documents : memos written by administration lawyers, and various reports, mostly written by military investigators, on the abuses.

I did not read the entire set of documents. But from the timeline and the memos, I would make the following observations:

1. The justification memos for torture began before the actual incidents of torture took place. I.e. the Bush administration was setting up the 'legal' framework for torture.
2. Guantanamo was selected as a detention center in order to be out of reach of U.S. courts. The Bush administration did not want to have independent judicial review of its actions.
3. As time went on, the administration sought to justify ever more severe forms of torture and abuse, in advance of those methods being applied.
4. The Bush administration claims that the low-ranking soldiers were rogue elements and were not acting within U.S. guidelines. That is an outright lie, as shown by the memos and the timeline in this book.
5. The attorney's who wrote the torture-justification memos knew that they were on shaky ground.
6. The refusal of the U.S. to grant P.O.W. status to Taliban soldiers was a mistake, and the administration was warned by the State Department, including Colin Powell, that it was a mistake.
7. In any case, the justifications used to deny P.O.W. status to the Taliban formed absolutely no justification for denying P.O.W. status to captured Iraqis.

The Bush administration has been consistently seeking absolute power for the President. This is about as un-American and unconstitutional as it gets. The President swore to uphold the constitution and has been doing everything in his power to subvert it. He needs to be impeached.