Many Bush fans cling to the idea that if Bush never had a policy that specified torture, then the systematic wide spread acts of torture, that occurred in Gitmo, Abu Graib and other locations, weren’t his fault.

And Bush and his supporters cling to another myth. That it was just a few bad apples acting on their own. “Only a handful” as Bush is fond of saying and his supporters are fond of believing.


The Bush administration deliberately created a policy that went out of its way to ignore the Geneva conventions. And Bush being typically irresponsible now reuses to acknowledge his policy snowballed and lead to widespread and more intense acts of prisoner abuse and torture. It’s much more convenient to blame a few bad apples.

But the key is, that the systematic prisoner abuse and torture emanated from the top, with Bush, Rumsfeld and Justice department lawyers. Interesting to note Colin Powell was deliberately kept out of the loop of the new policies disregarding the Geneva Conventions until they were already rolled out.. Of course, why would you let a decent person like Powell in on torture policies?

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/4989436/site/newsweek/


THE ROOTS OF TORTURE

The road to Abu Ghraib began after 9/11, when Washington wrote new rules to fight a new kind of war. A NEWSWEEK investigation
By John Barry, Michael Hirsh and Michael Isikoff






The appeal of Gitmo from the start was that, in the view of administration lawyers, the base existed in a legal twilight zone—or "the legal equivalent of outer space," as one former administration lawyer described it. And on Jan. 9, 2002, John Yoo of Justice's Office of Legal Counsel coauthored a sweeping 42-page memo concluding that neither the Geneva Conventions nor any of the laws of war applied to the conflict in Afghanistan.

Cut out of the process, as usual, was Colin Powell's State Department. So were military lawyers for the uniformed services. When State Department lawyers first saw the Yoo memo, "we were horrified," said one. As State saw it, the Justice position would place the United States outside the orbit of international treaties it had championed for years.

The White House was undeterred. By Jan. 25, 2002, according to a memo obtained by NEWSWEEK, it was clear that Bush had already decided that the Geneva Conventions did not apply at all, either to the Taliban or Al Qaeda.

Gonzales then laid out startlingly broad arguments that anticipated any objections to the conduct of U.S. soldiers or CIA interrogators in the future
Gonzales concluded in stark terms: "In my judgment, this new paradigm renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions." Gonzales also argued that dropping Geneva would allow the president to "preserve his flexibility" in the war on terror. His reasoning? That U.S. officials might otherwise be subject to war-crimes prosecutions under the Geneva Conventions.