It is official. According to a bipartisan Senate report, then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and President George W. Bush bear responsibility for the torture and abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, Bagram and Guantanamo and the tossing aside of the Geneva Conventions, which are part of US law.
It mystifies me as to why this report is being announced now, at the end of the week and at a time of the year in the political calendar when it will not get much play.
The report calls for no sanctions to be imposed, even though it implies that high US officials committed war crimes.
But if I were Rumsfeld and Bush, I’d avoid a lot of travel abroad from now on. Some zealous prosecutor might have them arrested, as happened to “Gen. Augusto Pinochet, who was charged in Spain and arrested in Britain (though he was released to Chile, he had been in danger of being extradited to Spain).
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