Torture: US Marine points to Rumsfeld -- Says orders violated Geneva Conventions and Military Policies

More than 90% of the people they picked up in Iraq were innocent and had done nothing. The issue will be whether the numbers from Iraq can be analyzed to develop some estimates about the likely numbers transported to Eastern Europe: Possibly in the several hundreds, if not thousands.

Think what is possible if this is allowed to occur in America under the Patriot Act: Detentions on the basis of accusations, then mistreatment by the CIA which is allowed to operate in the US.

The information that the troops were following orders to engage in these war crimes is consistent with what Capt Ian Fishback of the US Army asserts: That the accountability lies with the Senior leadership and SecDef Rumsfeld.* * *



It does not appear as though the conduct was consistent with 5100.77.

It remains to be understood how many abuse reports were kicked out of the system and not investigated. These are mandatory reports which military personnel must file when they come across information about war crimes.

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Democracy Now has a piece with a former Marine Interrogator who says knows of conduct that violates the Geneva Conventions.

AMY GOODMAN: Would you say when you see the court-martial of a few low-level soldiers, would you say that will start to stop the abuse, or how high up do you feel it goes?

TONY LAGOURANIS: Well, it obviously goes right up to the Pentagon, because they were issuing the interrogation rules of engagement, and the interrogation rules of engagement are not in accordance with the army field manual and not in accordance with the Geneva conventions. So, it's all the way up. You know, obviously, Lindsey England and Grainer, these guys -- you know, they needed to be punished, but it's not just them. It's -- it should have gone all the way up the chain.

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What's important to note is that the war crimes reports were not correctly processed, thus no basis for any one in Senior Positions to say there was no problem.

The above information will be likely used in a war crimes trial.

The US military appears to have misled the Congress over what is going on. We would hope that this pattern of misleading conduct be considered when assessing the results in the Eastern European torture investigations.

It is a red herring to go after the messenger, when they are simply reporting, as required under the law, information related to abuse, war crimes, or mistreatment of prisoners.