Amnesty Chief : U.S. Kills Prisoners in Secret Jails

Top GOP senator says Gitmo hearings might be appropriate:

Joe Biden says the illegal interrogation camp at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba has become "the greatest propaganda tool that exists for recruiting of terrorists around the world." Biden wants the Senate to hold hearings on Gitmo and other such camps run by the US around the world with an eye toward shutting them down. Doing so will make Americans safer, he said, because "I think more Americans are in jeopardy as a consequence of the perception that exists worldwide with its existence than if there were no Gitmo."

The Congress of the United States is just as responsible for the mess in Iraq as the Bush administration. What began, in the War Powers Act of 1973, as an attempt by Congress to control Presidential adventures during times of undeclared war has become a Congressional cop-out, allowing the people solely responsible for declaring war on other nations to cede war powers to the President. Like Pontius Pilate, they can "wash their hands" of the affair and keep a critical distance, maintain a stance of supposed moral superiority when shit starts to hit the fan.

Well, a lot of shit is hitting the fan right now.

The U.S. is maintaining an archipelago of prisons around the world, many of them secret prisons, into which people are being literally disappeared, held in indefinite, incommunicado detention without access to lawyers or a judicial system or to their families. And in some cases, at least, we know they are being mistreated, abused, tortured and even killed.

And of course the Bush administration is to blame for this. They set the stage, with the help of now Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, by officially defining torture as inflicting pain "equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death." Any pain inflicted by US GIs which did not meet that standard of measurement was not considered to be torture. The memo also hints at the belief that the Geneva Conventions allowed US GIs to resort to "cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment," since there were no punishments prescribed for such acts.

Gonzales was already on record stating his opinion that the "new paradigm" of the war on terror "renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions."

The abuses at Abu Ghraib were a direct result of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's decision to send Major General Geoffrey Miller there to "Gitmoize" the Iraqi prison camp, putting interrogations in the hands of CIA and military intelligence.

Look, Bush executed 152 prisoners while Governor of Texas. Some were certainly innocent. Why do we believe he would care about Iraqi prisoners any more than his own fellow Texans?

But the buck doesn't only stop in the Oval Office. It has to make its way past Capitol Hill first. And Congress passed the buck on this war.