"Heckuva Job" Rummy: Bad at Defense, Good At Torture

Like most classic conservatives, I've always been a great fan of personal responsibility. I wonder, once this total shitstorm breaks over him, will Rummy feel that way, too?


RUMSFELD MAY BE CRIMINALLY LIABLE FOR TORTURE:
Lt. General Randall Schmidt Implicates Defense Secretary Himself

From Human Rights Watch, here:

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld could be criminally liable for the torture of a detainee at Guantanamo Bay in late 2002 and early 2003, Human Rights Watch said today. . . A December 20, 2005 Army Inspector General’s report, obtained by Salon.com this week, contains a sworn statement by Lt. Gen. Randall M. Schmidt that implicates Secretary Rumsfeld in the abuse of detainee Mohammad al-Qahtani. Based on an investigation that he carried out in early 2005, which included two interviews with Rumsfeld, Gen. Schmidt describes the defense secretary as being "personally involved" in al-Qahtani’s interrogation.

Human Rights Watch urges the United States to name a special prosecutor to investigate the culpability of Rumsfeld and others in the al-Qahtani case.

"The question at this point is not whether Secretary Rumsfeld should resign, it’s whether he should be indicted,"said Joanne Mariner, Terrorism and Counterterrorism Program director at Human Rights Watch. . .
Human Rights Watch has obtained an unredacted copy of al-Qahtani’s interrogation log, and believes that the techniques used during al-Qahtani’s interrogation were so abusive that they amounted to torture. . . ."A six-week regime of sleep deprivation, forced exercises, stress positions, white noise, and sexual humiliation amounts to acts that were specifically intended to cause severe physical pain and suffering and severe mental pain and suffering," said Mariner. "That’s the legal definition of torture."

In 2005, the Judge Advocates General of the U.S. Army, Navy and Marine Corps told the U.S. Senate Committee on Armed Services that the techniques used on al-Qahtani violated the U.S. Army Field Manual on Intelligence Interrogation, and would have been illegal if perpetrated by another country on captured U.S. personnel. The U.S. State Department also regularly condemns as torture the same techniques in its annual Country Report on Human Rights, citing their use in countries such as North Korea and Iran. . . .

Rumsfeld could be liable under the doctrine of "command responsibility" – the legal principle that holds a superior responsible for crimes committed by his subordinates when he knew or should have known that they were being committed, but fails to take reasonable measures to stop them.

I think Rummy should be "personally involved" by himself receiving the treatment he ordered to be meted out to others. Sure, it's a little eye-for-eye, but Rummy's an eye-for-eye kinda guy, ain't he?

More at Salon, here.

Rumsfeld
torture
Salon.com
Human Rights Watch