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McCain demands accountability for torture

He had spent five years as a prisoner of war in communist North Vietnam, so when Senator John McCain spoke, his words carried the extra weight of personal experience.

What angered him was the Bush administration's decision that Taliban fighters captured on the battlefields of Afghanistan in 2001 were not eligible for international protections for prisoners of war. It was not the first time, McCain said, that a government had done that.

"You know the North Vietnamese made the same determination about American prisoners?" McCain, a Republican from Arizona, asked.

"Yes, sir," replied Vice Admiral Albert Church.

Church appeared before the Senate Armed Services Committee on Thursday to present his findings from a lengthy investigation into how the administration had developed and used its prisoner interrogation policies.

McCain gave voice to a concern shared by many, including some in the military: Regardless of who is blamed for the documented cases of prisoner abuse at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison and in Afghanistan, the origins of the problem may lie in the Geneva Conventions issue.

"I worry, admiral," McCain said, "that if we decide that a certain country's military personnel are not eligible for treatment under a convention that we signed, then wouldn't it be logical to expect then they would declare, as the North Vietnamese did, that American prisoners are not eligible for protection under the Geneva Conventions?"

The administration says that while it considered the Taliban fighters ineligible for such protections, it sought to treat them humanely.

Church reported that he could not find a single, overarching explanation for the abuses. He also found no evidence that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld directed or condoned a policy of abuse.

"So there's been no assessment of accountability of any senior officials, either within or outside of the Department of Defense, for policies that may have contributed to abuses of prisoners," said Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, the committee's top Democrat.

Church, a former Navy inspector-general, is now director of the Navy staff at the Pentagon. A 21-page summary of his findings was made public; the Pentagon said it did not intend to release the full report. Church said many details underlying his conclusions are classified.

Asked later at a Pentagon news conference whether he saw any reason not to release his full report to the public, Church said that as long as classified information was removed, "that would be fine."

The human rights group Amnesty International USA criticized Church's report as being too easy on top officials and should it should become public in its entirety.

Church focused on the Pentagon's development of interrogation policies and techniques and the extent to which that process could be linked to the sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib and other acts of mistreatment documented in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"Even in the absence of a precise definition of `humane' treatment, it is clear that none of the pictured abuses at Abu Ghraib bear any resemblance to approved policies at any level," Church concluded.
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