Bush Team Implicated in Prisoner Abuse

Bush Team Implicated in Prisoner Abuse

Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh's new book "Chain of Command: The Road From 9/11 to Abu Ghraib" claims that not only was the Bush administration aware of the torture of prisoners in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib but had put the mechanics of inmate abuse in place.

"Hersh provides details of how President George Bush signed off on the establishment of a secret unit that was given advance approval to kill or capture and interrogate "high-value" suspects - considered by many to be in defiance of international law - an officially 'unacknowledged' programme that was eventually transferred wholesale from Guantánamo to the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

Evidence of prisoner abuse and possible war crimes at Guantánamo Bay reached the highest levels of the Bush administration as early as autumn 2002, but Donald Rumsfeld, the defence secretary, chose to do nothing about it. Hersh, quotes one former marine at the camp recalling sessions in which guards would 'f..k with [detainees] as much as we could' by inflicting pain on them." Read the Guardian report at http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1303106,00.html.