We Can't Remain Silent by Bob Herbert

[Kerrytravelers]

<http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/040105Y.shtml>

We Can't Remain Silent
By Bob Herbert
The New York Times

Friday 01 April 2005

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During the dinner and in follow-up interviews, Rear Adm. John Hutson, who is now president of the Franklin Pierce Law Center in Concord, N.H., and Brig. Gen. James Cullen, a lawyer in private practice in New York, said they believed that both the war effort and the military itself have been seriously undermined by official policies that encouraged the abuse of prisoners.

<snip>

The two retired officers have lent their support to an extraordinary lawsuit that seeks to hold Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld ultimately accountable for policies that have given rise to torture and other forms of prisoner abuse. And last September they were among a group of eight retired admirals and generals who wrote a letter to President Bush urging him to create an independent 9/11-type commission to fully investigate the problem of prisoner abuse from the top to the bottom of the command structure.

Admiral Hutson, who served as the Navy's judge advocate general from 1997 to 2000, said he felt sick the first time he saw the photos of soldiers abusing detainees at Abu Ghraib prison. "I felt like somebody in my family had died," he said.

Even before that, he had been concerned by the Bush administration's decision to deny the protections of the Geneva Conventions to some detainees, and by the way prisoners at Guantánamo Bay were being processed and treated. He said that when the scandal at Abu Ghraib broke, "I knew in my soul that it was going to be bigger than that, that we had just seen the tip of the iceberg and that it was going to get worse and worse and worse."

<snip>






I always love Bob Herbert. He's been my new hero for quite some time now.