Former secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld shares a laugh
with former president George W. Bush and former vice president Dick Cheney
during his farewell parade at the Pentagon.
By: Matt Sledge, The Huffington Post
Source: Press TV
Bradley Manning was sentenced to 35 years in prison on
Wednesday for releasing 700,000 documents about the United States' worldwide
diplomacy and wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Manning was a 25-year-old Army private first class at the time of his arrest.
He saw himself as an idealist acting to end the wars, and said in online chats
with hacker Adrian Lamo that he was particularly concerned about the abuse of
detainees in Iraq. No political or military higher-ups have ever been
prosecuted for detainee abuse or torture in Iraq, Afghanistan or at Guantanamo
Bay.
"One of the serious problems with Manning's case is that it sets a
chilling precedent, that people who leak information ... can be prosecuted this
aggressively as a deterrent to that conduct," said Andrea Prasow, senior
counterterrorism counsel and advocate in Human Rights Watch's U.S. Program.
"Shouldn't we be deterring people who commit torture?"
Here are some of the individuals who have been involved since 9/11 in detainee
abuse and torture, and potential war crimes, and have never been prosecuted.
George W. Bush
George W. Bush was president when the U.S. invaded Iraq based on faulty
intelligence, tortured terror prisoners and conducted extraordinary renditions
around the world.
"Enhanced interrogation," a Bush administration euphemism for
torture, was approved at the highest level. A "principals committee"
composed of Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Advisor Condoleezza
Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell, CIA
Director George Tenet and Attorney General John Ashcroft signed off on the
methods.
"There are solid grounds to investigate Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Tenet
for authorizing torture and war crimes," said Kenneth Roth, executive
director of Human Rights Watch, when the group released a report called
"Getting Away With Torture" in 2011.
Dick Cheney
As Bush's vice president, Cheney pushed the nation over to the "dark
side," as he called it, in the war on terror.
The U.S. used extraordinary renditions to swoop up terror suspects and send
them to repressive regimes for torture. Cheney was the key driver in producing
the faulty intelligence that led the U.S. into war in Iraq. And he steadfastly
defended the CIA's use of water-boarding and other torture tactics on U.S.
prisoners.
Cheney "fears being tried as a war criminal," according to Colin
Powell's former chief of staff Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, but he never has been.
Donald Rumsfeld
One of the planners of the Iraq War, Rumsfeld steadfastly maintained while Defense
Secretary under Bush that U.S. soldiers did not have an obligation to stop
torture being used by their Iraqi counterparts. He also approved of
"stripping prisoners naked, hooding them, exposing prisoners to extremes
of heat and cold, and slamming them up against walls" at Guantanamo.
While deployed to Iraq, Manning discovered that Iraqi soldiers had arrested
members of a political group for producing a pamphlet called "Where Did
the Money Go?" decrying corruption in the cabinet of Prime Minister Nouri
al-Maliki.
"‘I immediately took that information and *ran* to the officer to explain
what was going on," Manning wrote in the chat logs. "He didn’t want
to hear any of it … he told me to shut up and explain how we could assist the
FPs in finding *MORE* detainees."
George Tenet and CIA torturers
Tenet was the CIA chief who told Bush that the case for war with Iraq was a
"slam dunk." Under his watch, the CIA waterboarded Khalid Sheikh
Mohammed, Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri.
Further down the chain of command at the spy agency, lower-level officers have
escaped prosecution for killing a prisoner in Iraq and one in Afghanistan in
CIA custody. Attorney General Eric Holder in 2012 ruled out prosecuting anyone
responsible for those deaths.
In sharp contrast, former CIA agent John Kiriakou is currently serving a
30-month sentence for revealing to reporters the names of interrogators
involved in detainee abuse.
Abu Ghraib higher-ups
Although low-level soldiers like former Army Reserve Specialist Lynndie England
were court-martialed for their role in detainee abuse at this notorious prison
in Iraq, graphically illustrated in photos, the only officer prosecuted in the
case had his conviction tossed out.
A 2009 Senate Armed Services Committee report found that the abuses at Abu
Ghraib were not the result of a few unmonitored bad apples but rather the
direct result of "enhanced interrogation" practices approved of by
officials much higher up in the Bush administration.
-----------------------
Update: 11:55 am
Bradley Manning In His Own Words After Being Sentenced to 35 Years
Video Source: The Real News
Manning's attorney David Coombs reads American Hero
Bradley Manning's statement after he is imprisoned for 35 years in a Military
Prison.
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