This story,
Hussam Mohammed Amin: Former Iraqi Weapons Monitor Describes U.S. Abuse For First Time, reveals what happened to Amin, the most-wanted Iraqi known as the "Six of Clubs". But the article misses a key point: why was the U.S. Government treating Major General Amin, who was uniformed military, like a terrorist?
We heard that the Geneva conventions did not apply to terrorists because they were non-state actors. But why did the conventions not apply to Amin?
Amin was given the address of a house in the Karada section of Baghdad, from which he was taken in a small convoy of cars to a former presidential site in Ramadi and turned over to the U.S. military. There, he said, he was interrogated for several hours by a “respectful, logical and professional” American colonel with a “good background” on Iraq’s prior WMD programs. Afterwards, he said, he and the colonel shared lunch.
It was shortly after lunch, Amin said, that he was suddenly overwhelmed by soldiers, his hands and feet bound and a black bag pulled over his head. They hustled him away to a Saddam-era base that U.S. forces used as the first stop for their top prisoners.
Could there be a sharper distinction between the old-line professionals and the new thuggish element in the U.S. military for whom torture is standard operating procedure?
Amin
surrendered voluntarily! Why was he even being held prisoner?
Senior technocrats like Amin could have been relatively easily induced to cooperate without being abused, or even arrested, Duelfer believes. He said he made an effort to get some detainees including Amin released. He was unsuccessful. “The same quality of intelligence that went into the miscalculations about Iraqi WMD went into creating the stupid blacklist of people to be captured,” he said. “It was almost like they made a list of every Iraqi whose name they knew. Some of them were people who opposed Saddam and could have been really helpful to us, but they’d end up in prison and you couldn’t get them out.”
While it doesn't say so directly, the article implies that Iraqi POWs were not treated according to the Geneva conventions. Why was Amin, an Iraqi POW, treated worse than the Japanese and German POWs were during World War 2, many of whom were
held in the United States?
Since Amin was Iraq’s WMD program guy who maintained that “Iraq is clean of weapons of mass destruction”, this may be the clearest example yet of the use of torture in support of political goals.
“I have been interrogated dozens times by the CIA, the FBI, the U.S. army, the U.S. military intelligence, the State Department, the British intelligence and even a professor from Harvard University. All of them agreed that it’s unfair that I stay in prison and that I was just doing my job through collaborating with the weapons of mass destruction inspection team,” Amin wrote on April 26, 2005. “The last interrogation was by Charles Duelfer, the head of the [Iraq Survey Group]. He told me that keeping me in prison for this long is wrong and that he and the team are sympathetic. Moreover, he told me that he expected me to be out of prison ‘very soon,’ and that was in November of 2004. They lie to me every time.”
Since all the underlings sympathized with Amin but were powerless to change anything, it’s clear that the policy came from the top.
(Hat tip to fatster at
Emptywheel for linking the article about Amin.)
[This post is a slightly modified version of my
original comment at Emptywheel.]
