Policy of Abuse

A Senate committee shows how Bush administration decisions led to the mistreatment of prisoners.

"THE ABUSE of detainees at Abu Ghraib in late 2003 was not simply the result of a few soldiers acting on their own." Some 4 1/2 years after its first hearing to investigate allegations that U.S. personnel grossly abused detainees in Iraq, the Senate Armed Services committee at last has agreed on a conclusion that was obvious to many from almost the beginning of the scandal: that the sickening photographs of naked, hooded prisoners being threatened by dogs and forced into humiliating poses were the direct result of policies adopted by then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and other senior Bush administration officials. The detailed report on detainee abuses unanimously approved by the committee and released last week doesn't break much new ground factually. But as a bipartisan finding after more than 18 months of deliberations, it delivers what ought to be a crushing blow to the continuing attempts of the Bush administration to deny, whitewash or obfuscate the truth behind the scandal.

Mr. Rumsfeld and U.S. generals in Iraq told the Armed Services Committee at that first hearing in May 2004 that the abusive Abu Ghraib techniques were invented by rogue enlisted soldiers skylarking on the night shift. Even as the evidence against that version mounted, Mr. Rumsfeld stuck to his story while doing his best to shift responsibility to others; the Pentagon brass clumsily tried to pin blame on a female reserve brigadier general who had nothing to do with the interrogation of prisoners.

The Senate report meticulously details the real story. In the summer of 2002, Mr. Rumsfeld's chief counsel, William J. Haynes II, sought guidance from a Pentagon agency that specializes in teaching U.S. special forces how to resist harsh interrogation techniques and torture of the kind employed by foreign dictatorships. A number of the techniques, like sleep deprivation, enforced standing, nudity and intimidation with dogs, were then adopted by the Pentagon for use at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, with the explicit approval of Mr. Rumsfeld. The legality of the techniques was approved by Bush appointees at the Justice Department; Mr. Haynes dismissed the arguments of senior military lawyers who said they were illegal.

Within days of Mr. Rumsfeld's approval of these methods, the Senate report says, military intelligence officers in Afghanistan had been briefed on them, and the command headquarters had issued a memo adopting many of them. Those same techniques were then adopted in Iraq, first for special missions units and then for all U.S. forces. Though Mr. Rumsfeld rescinded some of the techniques in 2003 and U.S. commanders in Iraq also backtracked on their initial approval of them, the original harsh methods continued to be used by U.S. forces -- including the soldiers at Abu Ghraib.

Armed Services Chairman Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.) and Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) have vowed for years to establish full accountability for the abuses of detainees by the military, and the new report goes a long way toward accomplishing that aim. But the full story of the Bush administration's violations of international norms in arresting and detaining foreigners has yet to be told: There has been no account, for example, of the CIA's secret prisons and the torture of al-Qaeda leaders held in them. That's why the next Congress and the Obama administration should agree to establish a full-fledged investigative commission, like the one that studied the events of Sept. 11, 2001, to give a comprehensive accounting of the abuses against foreign detainees and how they came about. Only when this terrible story is told, fully and repeatedly, can Americans come to terms with it -- and ensure that it does not happen again.