Rights group: US has deliberate torture strategy

The Bush administration has a deliberate strategy of abusing terror suspects during interrogations, Human Rights Watch said today in its annual report on the treatment of prisoners.

The human rights group based its conclusions mostly on statements by senior administration officials in the past year, and said President George Bush’s reassurances that the US does not torture suspects were deceptive and rang hollow.

“In 2005 it became disturbingly clear that the abuse of detainees had become a deliberate, central part of the Bush administration’s strategy of interrogating terrorist suspects,” the report said.

On a trip to Europe last month, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told foreign leaders that cruel and degrading interrogation methods were forbidden for all US personnel at home and abroad.

She provided little detail, however, about which practices were banned and other specifics.

White House spokesman Scott McClellan said he had only seen news accounts of the report, but he rejected its conclusions.

“It appears to be based more on a political agenda than facts,” he said.

“The US does more than any country in the world to advance freedom and promote human rights.

…The focus should be more on those who are violating human rights and denying people their human rights,” he said.

In a separate report, the organisation strongly criticised three insurgent groups in Iraq – al-Qaida, Ansar al-Sunna and the Islamic Army – for targeting civilians with car bombs and suicide bombers in mosques, markets, bus stations.

However, the group said the abuses “took place in the context of the US-led invasion of Iraq and the ensuing military occupation that resulted in tens of thousands of civilian deaths and sparked the emergence of insurgent groups.”

Human Rights Watch has criticised the Bush administration’s war against terrorism before, registering concern that abuses in the name of fighting terrorism were unjustified and counterproductive.

In other reports, the group has protested that the Bush administration’s promotion of democracy was applied narrowly and missed allies, such as Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, that were due criticism.

The latest report taking aim at the Bush administration said that the president’s repeated assurances that US interrogators do not torture prisoners studiously avoid mentioning that international law prohibits cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment of prisoners.

The report said that Alberto Gonzales – while still the nominee to become attorney general – claimed in Senate testimony in January 2005 the power to use cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment as long as the prisoner was a non-American held outside the US.

“Other governments obviously subject detainees to such treatment or worse, but they do so clandestinely,” the report said.

“The Bush administration is the only government in the world known to claim this power openly, as a matter of official policy, and to pretend that it is lawful.”

Last autumn, Gonzales submitted documents to the Senate Judiciary Committee saying “it is the policy of the administration to abide by” the relevant portion of the torture treaty overseas, “even if such compliance is not legally required.”

In December, Bush bowed to congressional and international pressure and signed legislation sponsored by Senator John McCain to forbid harsh treatment of detainees.

He did so after initially threatening to veto such legislation, and after Vice President Dick Cheney unsuccessfully lobbied legislators to kill the measure or at least exempt the Central Intelligence Agency.