Summary
from Saturday’s Session (1/21/06) of the International Commission of Inquiry on Crimes Against Humanity Committed by the Bush Administration
by Daniel Meltzer
Dramatic
and newsworthy testimony was offered by a number of prominent and lesser-known
witnesses, including former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murray and
retired US Army Brigadier General Janis Karpinsky (who commanded the notorious
Abu Ghraib Prison in Iraq), testifying before the International Commission of
Inquiry on Crimes Against Humanity Committed by the Bush Administration.
Jurors
heard first-hand reports of children as young as seven years old being held captive
at Guantanomo Bay and of systematic torture
methods being employed there as well as in Iraq and Uzbekistan. They also heard of the
unreported rapes and suicides of an uncounted number of women soldiers serving
in Iraq, as well as of reckless pollution
of the great lakes and arctic territories attributed to government policies
that favor industry and big business over the interests and health of citizens.
Barbara
Olshansky, an attorney representing inmates at Guantanomo Bay Prison on Cuba,
where an estimated 500 prisoners are currently incarcerated, some of them for
more than five years without charges having been filed, told a shocked audience
of more than 350 attendees that nearly half the prisoners have been on a hunger
strike for months, and that many have been beaten and are now at what she
termed the “danger stage,” being force fed through their nostrils
while strapped to gurneys. Olshansky, alerting the audience that she would come
as close to the margin of permissible revelations as possible without
endangering her own freedom under strict government restrictions, said she knew
of at least one case of a seven year old child being held at Guantanomo and of
other adolescents whose presence was only made known after they passed the age
of sixteen. She also said she knew of one prisoner who is ninety-six years old.
She
has been fighting, she said, to secure speedy trials for anyone currently
incarcerated facing possible charges, and for the innocent to be released immediately.
Inmates
also complain of lack of proper medical attention and minors, she says, have
been isolated and segregated from adults. All the inmates face great natural
difficulty being seen by their families, she pointed out, as Guantanomo is on
an island in the Caribbean and most of the families reside in the Middle East. Relatives, she reports,
have been told they are permitted to plan funerals for the inmates.
Former
British Ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murray testified of his experience in a
country he described as having “possibly the worst government in the
world,” a recipient of billions of dollars in US aid, former site of a
major US military installation, and a member of the “coalition of the
willing” that joined Britain and the United States in the Iraq war in
2003. Sixty percent of Uzbekistan’s population lives in slavery,
he said, earning the equivalent of seven cents per 12-hour day in a six-day
work week, as literal captives on cotton plantation, the country being one of
the world’s leading exporter of cotton. Torture is commonplace in the police
state, he told a stunned audience, where people are literally boiled
alive. He said he had seen with his own eyes
evidence of such torture and murders. The CIA and Britain’s MI6 routinely accept
intelligence provided, he says, by Uzbek security forces who torture their
prisoners, even to death.
Murray resigned his post, he said,
rather than continue in the employ of a government that condones torture and
that is complicit in illegal war.
Murray brought the audience to its
feet when he said; “You cannot build security on evil,” and again
when he declared; “I am quite willing to die rather than to have someone
else tortured on my behalf.”
Retired
US Army Brigadier General Janis Karpinsky, deposed by law professor Marjorie
Cohn, spoke of her experience as commander of the notorious Abu Ghraib Prison
in Iraq, scene of the shocking
torture photos that resulted in the convictions of a small number of enlisted personnel
last year. Senior officers and civilian Pentagon officials, including Defense
Secretary Rumsfeld, have been exonerated.
Karpinski,
who was blamed by the administration for the scandal, told of how
responsibility for interrogations at her prison was taken away from her and
handed to the CIA and private contractors. Based on her observations and what she was
told, she testified that it is her conclusion that the orders for the torture
regimens originated in the office of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, with
the active participation of his subordinates and Army Generals assigned to Iraq
with specific instructions to “Gitmoize” Abu Ghraib (meaning to introduce
torture methods already being carried out in Guantanomo Bay). She said it was
her understanding that Sgt. Grainer, one of a small number of enlisted
personnel convicted and imprisoned for the Abu Ghraib tortures, was
specifically requested by the command for duty at the Iraqi torture prison, and
assigned to the night shift, where the abuses were carried out.
In
interviews afterward, Karpinski said there have been a large number of
unreported suicides among soldiers serving in Iraq, that the fatality statistics
reported to the media by the pentagon do not include suicides, deaths in
accidents or deaths from illness. She said women serving in the military in
Iraq have been raped while using outdoor latrines in the middle of the night
where male soldiers lurk in wait for them, and that several women have died in
their sleep from dehydration owing to their decision to drink no water past
mid-afternoon in a country where temperatures average 120 degrees, that they do
this in order to avoid having to get up in the middle of the night to use the latrines.
None of these deaths by kidney failure have been reported by the press, she
notes.
Tom
Goldtooth of the Indigenous Environmental Network, in a compelling presentation,
told of the routine pollution of the waters of the great lakes, the pollution
of fisheries regularly used by Native Americans from runoffs from various
industrial sites. Soil and water are contaminated by mercury, dioxins, wood
pulp and other foreign substances at “dangerous levels,” endangering
the health and lives of people who fish the waters and who farm on the lands
that adjoin them. Dangerous levels of PCB’s, he reports, and are being found in
the breast milk of pregnant indigenous women. Goldtooth blames the
industry-friendly policies of the Bush administration for endangering the
health and lives of indigenous peoples in particular who inhabit these northern territories.
Other
offenses he cited include the spraying of artificial snow on the peaks of
eleven sacred mountains in the Northwest for recreational purposes, and the
well-documented oil spills in arctic regions. In Alaska, Goldtooth testified,
destruction of the ozone layer has produced a rise in the numbers of people
with cataracts and immune deficiency ailments. He also cited contamination of Great Lakes waters with aluminum runoff
from a GM manufacturing plant.