Pyramids packed with fossil shells

Many of Egypt's most famous monuments, such as the Sphinx and Cheops pyramid at Giza, contain hundreds of thousands of marine fossils, according to a new study.

Most of the fossils are intact and preserved in the monument walls, giving clues to how the monuments were built.

The authors suggest the stones that make up the Giza plateau, Fayum and Abydos monuments must have been carved out of natural stone as they reveal what chunks of the sea floor must have looked like over 4000 years ago, when the buildings were erected.

"The observed random emplacement and strictly homogenous distribution of the fossil shells within the whole rock is in harmony with their initial in situ setting in a fluidal sea bottom environment," write Professor Ioannis Liritzis and his colleagues from the University of the Aegean and the University of Athens.

The researchers analysed the mineralogy, as well as the chemical makeup and structure, of small material samples chiselled from the Sphinx Temple; the Osirion Shaft; the Valley Temple; the Cheops, Khefren and Menkaure pyramids at Giza; Osirion at Abydos; the Temple of Seti I at Abydos; and Qasr el-Sagha at Fayum.

X-ray diffraction and radioactivity measurements, which can penetrate solid materials to help illuminate their composition, were carried out.

Granite, sandstone, limestone

The analysis determined the primary building materials were pinky granites, black and white granites, sandstones and various types of limestones.

The latter contained numerous shell fossils of the genus Nummulites, simple marine organisms whose name means 'little coins'.

"[At Cheops alone they constituted] a proportion of up to 40% of the whole building stone rock," the researchers write in the latest issue of the Journal of Cultural Heritage.

Nummulites that lived during the Eocene period around 55.8-33.9 million years ago are most commonly found in Egyptian limestone.

Fossils have also been unearthed at other sites, such as in Turkey and throughout the Mediterranean.

When nummulites are bisected horizontally they appears as a perfect spiral. Since they were common in ancient Egypt, it's believed the shells were used as coins, perhaps explaining their name.

Fossils of their ancient marine relatives - sand dollars, starfish and sea urchins - were also detected in the Egyptian limestone.

Intact fossils throughout the stone

The fossils are largely undamaged and are distributed in a random manner within the stone, in accordance with their typical distribution at sea floors.

So, Liritzis and his team argue that the large building stones used to construct the monuments must have been carved out of natural stone instead of cast in moulds.

To further their argument, the scientists say the x-ray patterns detect no presence of lime, which would be expected along with the salt natron, which would indicate cast materials.

They also point out there are no references of moulds, buckets or other casting tools in early Egyptian paintings, sculptures or texts.

Carved or cast?

Joseph Davidovits, professor and director of France's Geopolymer Institute, formulated the theory that natural limestone was cast like concrete to build the pyramids.

Davidovits says that Liritzis and his team "should have taken into account the scientific analysis" he and other researchers conducted before backing the carved-not-cast hypothesis.

Robert Temple, co-director of the Project for Historical Dating and a visiting research fellow at universities in the US, Egypt and Greece, has also studied Egypt's monuments.

He agrees with Davidovits about the casting.

"There is no evidence known that suggests the ancient Egyptians had cranes," he says. "Without cranes, it is difficult to imagine how they could have lifted giant stones, some as heavy as 200 tonnes."

Temple, however, agrees about the importance of the fossils.

"Egyptian pyramid blocks of limestone tend to contain fossil shells and nummulites, often huge quantities of them, many of them intact, and many of them of surprisingly large size," he says.

"Frankly, not many people pay attention to the shells, which I have always thought was a shame. 'Seashells in the desert' - a good story."

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High cost of drilling concern both suppliers and consumers

As the OPEC oil producing countries have lost incentive to undertake huge amount of investment to maintain the output ceiling, the Non-OPEC states have their own problem in this respect.

A combination of falling production and rising domestic consumption could wipe out Mexico's exports within five years, including the 1.5 million barrels it sends to the United States each day.

Another country, Russia, is also troubling analysts' forecasts.

The country is not exactly running out of places to look for oil - a huge part of Eastern Siberia remains unexplored - and Russia has been the biggest contributor to the growth in energy supplies in the last decade.

But this month, Russian energy officials warned that the days of stunning growth that followed the demise of the Soviet Union were over, as the country would focus on stabilizing its output. Russia today produces about 10 million barrels of oil a day, up from a low point of 6 million barrels in 1996.

About 75 percent of the world's oil reserves are in OPEC countries, where governments voluntarily restrict their output to push up prices.

As countries like Russia slow output, analysts say OPEC will have to pick up the slack. The oil cartel currently accounts for 40 percent of the world's oil exports.

Further clouding the picture, Saudi Arabia, the world's top oil exporter, signaled last week that it might have trouble increasing its production.

Saudi Arabia, the de facto leader of OPEC, signaled it would freeze any further expansion after next year.

That dims the long-range outlook for OPEC supplies, though in the near term, Saudi Arabia is expected to loom larger in the market as it completes a $50 billion plan to increase its capacity to 12.5 million barrels a day.

Yet that leaves it well short of the 15 million barrels that most experts say they expected the kingdom to produce in the long run.

OPEC's 13 members say they plan to spend $150 billion to expand capacity by five million barrels a day by 2012, according to estimates by the cartel. But that also falls short of most projections that say OPEC will need to pump 60 million barrels a day by 2030, up from around 36 million barrels a day today, to meet the planned growth in demand.

Not everyone has a pessimistic outlook. The US Energy Department forecasts sustained growth in non-OPEC supplies this year and next.

A study by the National Petroleum Council, an industry group that provides advice to the secretary of energy, outlined a variety of possibilities for oil expansion, and concluded that the world still had plenty of petroleum resources that could be tapped.

In fact, high prices have sparked a global dash for oil. Companies are trawling deep oceans or seeking to drill in the Arctic Ocean.

In some cases, the hunt has been successful. Brazil, for example, has struck large offshore discoveries that could turn the country into one of the world's top 10 producers in the coming decade. Yet it takes years to bring such remote fields into production, and the market needs oil now.

To make up the shortfall, the world is increasingly turning to fuels made from unconventional sources, like biofuels or heavy oil.

Canadian tar sands, for example, have attracted large investments, and biofuels have accounted for much of the growth in fuel supplies in the last two years.

The International Energy Agency, an adviser to industrialized countries, estimates that current investments will be insufficient to replace declining oil production, let alone increase overall output.

The energy agency said it would take $5.4 trillion by 2030 to bolster global output, a level of investment that is unlikely to be met.

It said a crisis "involving an abrupt run-up in prices" could not be ruled out before 2015. --IRNA

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Poor children main victims of climate change: U.N.

Millions of the world's poorest children are among the most vulnerable and unwitting victims of climate change caused by the rich developed world, a United Nations report said on Tuesday, calling for urgent action.

The UNICEF report "Our Climate, Our Children, Our Responsibility" measured action on targets set in the Millennium Development Goals to halve child poverty by 2015. It found failure on counts from health to survival, education and sex equality.

"It is clear that a failure to address climate change is a failure to protect children," said UNICEF UK director David Bull. "Those who have contributed least to climate change -- the world's poorest children -- are suffering the most."

The report said climate change could add 40,000-160,000 extra child deaths a year in Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa through lower economic growth.

It also noted that if temperatures rose by two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels -- up to 200 million people globally would face hunger -- a figure rising to 550 million with a temperature rise of three degrees.

The UNICEF report said economic damage due to climate change would force parents to withdraw children from schools -- the only place that many of them are guaranteed at least one meal a day in many areas -- to fetch water and fuel instead.

The environmental changes wrought by climate change will also expand the range of deadly diseases like malaria, which already kills 800,000 children a year and is now being seen in previously unaffected areas.

Scientists predict that global average temperatures will rise by between 1.6 and 4.0 degrees Celsius this century due to carbon emissions from burning fossil fuels for power and transport, causing floods, famines, violent storms and droughts.

Efforts are being made to reach an international agreement on action to ensure temperatures do not rise more than 2.0 degrees.

But some environmentalists say 2.0 degrees is inevitable whatever action is taken now, partly because of the 30-year time lag in climate response to emitted carbon and partly because nations like China can't and won't stop burning carbon.

China, with vast coal reserves and an economy growing at 10 percent a year, is set to overtake the United States as the world's biggest carbon emitter as it opens a new coal-fired power station a week.

Developing nations, under pressure to sign up to new curbs on carbon emissions at the end of next year, say there is no reason they should keep their people in poverty when the problem has been caused by the rich developed world.

"Rich countries' responsibility for the bulk of past emissions demands that we give our strong support," said Nicholas Stern whose report in 2006 on the economic implications of the climate crisis sparked international concern.

"Business-as-usual or delayed action would lead to the probability of much higher temperature increases which would catastrophically transform our planet," he wrote in a foreword to Tuesday's report.

"It will be the young and the poor and developing countries that will suffer earliest and hardest. We cannot allow this to happen."

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Halliburton Bribe Case Haunts Cheney

Dick Cheney’s tenure at Halliburton ended eight years ago, but a federal investigation of alleged bribes from a company subsidiary to Nigerian officials lingers from the Cheney era, raising questions about what the Vice President knew or should have known.

In its quarterly filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission on April 25, Halliburton said the Justice Department was widening its probe to determine whether Kellogg Brown & Root paid $180 million in bribes to Nigerian officials to win a $5 billion construction contract for the Bonny Island natural gas liquefaction plant.

Halliburton also said the Justice Department is investigating whether bribes were paid to Nigerian officials relating to KBR’s construction of an offshore platform. The bribes allegedly went to the notoriously corrupt Nigerian dictator Sani Abacha and some of his subordinates.

The Justice Department "has evidence of payments to Nigerian officials by another agent in connection with a separate KBR-managed project in Nigeria called the Shell EA project," according to a footnote in Halliburton’s SEC filing.

The footnote’s reference to Shell was the first time the petroleum giant was linked to the bribery suspicions. Representatives from Shell and Halliburton did not return repeated calls or e-mails for comment.

KBR, which also has handled lucrative U.S. government support contracts for U.S. troops in Iraq and elsewhere, was spun off from Halliburton last year into a separate company.

In its quarterly filing last October, Halliburton said it was subpoenaed by the Justice Department and SEC over the use – by a KBR-led consortium known as TSKJ – “of an immigration services provider, apparently managed by a Nigerian immigration official, to which approximately $1.8 million in payments in excess of costs of visas were allegedly made between approximately 1997 and the termination of the provider in December 2004 and our 2007 reporting of this matter to the government.”

Halliburton also noted that federal investigators had “expressed concern regarding the level of our cooperation,” wording that suggests suspicion of a cover-up or at least foot-dragging.

Halliburton’s April 25 filing marked the first time that specific evidence was cited to support claims that Halliburton bribed Nigerian officials in violation of the U.S. Corrupt Foreign Practices Act while Cheney was the company’s chief executive officer.

The SEC, which regulates companies that sell stock on public markets as Halliburton does, also has been investigating the case. Halliburton said it had agreed to extend the statute of limitations related to the investigation.

According to previous published accounts of the bribery scandal, the cash allegedly was laundered through UK lawyer Jeffrey Tesler, who served as a consultant to KBR after it was formed in a 1998 merger that Cheney engineered between Halliburton and Dresser Industries.

French Disclosures

The bribery investigation was launched in 2003 when Georges Krammer, a former executive French company Technip, a member of the consortium for the Bonny Island project, informed French magistrate Renaud Van Ruymbeke that the contracts his group obtained came as a result of payments Tesler made to Nigerian officials from a slush fund the lawyer allegedly managed.

For more than a year, the magistrate poured over evidence to determine whether Cheney may have been responsible under French law for at least one of four bribery payments to the Nigerian officials.

Under French law, “the head of a company can be charged with ‘misuse of corporate assets’ for bribes paid by any employee – even if the executive didn’t know about the improper payments.” Authorities in the UK and Switzerland also have been investigating the matter.

Legal observers say it is highly unlikely that the U.S. Justice Department will further implicate Cheney in the scandal even if alleged bribery did take place on his watch. To date, there has been no direct evidence indicating that Cheney played a direct role in the bribes.

However, during Cheney’s tenure, Halliburton did expand operations in Nigeria despite human rights abuses by Gen. Abacha’s regime and environmental damage to the Niger Delta caused by international oil companies, Shell and Chevron, both of which signed contracts with Halliburton subsidiaries.

In April 2000, Brown & Root Energy Services, a business unit of Halliburton, was selected by Shell Petroleum Development Co. of Nigeria to work on the development of an offshore oil and gas facility, the first of its kind for Shell.

The deal, valued at $300 million, has been questioned by activists who have tried to hold Shell accountable for the pollution and the human rights abuses that have harmed Nigerian indigenous groups in a part of the Niger Delta known as Ogoniland.

In its four-plus decades of oil exploration in Nigeria, Shell has been responsible for repeated environmental calamities, involving oil spills, noxious gas flares, cleared forests, despoiled farmland and pipeline blowouts.

Gen. Abacha’s appreciation for the money that Shell’s operations put into his coffers made him an eager ally when the oil industry faced popular protests, which were crushed by the dictator’s army and security forces.

In 1995, the year Cheney joined Halliburton, renowned writer and environmental advocate Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight of his colleagues were hanged by the Abacha government for their efforts to prevent Shell from continuing to poison the environment of the Niger Delta.

It is estimated that more than 2,000 people have been murdered for their involvement in protests against Shell’s activities in the Delta. Most of those murdered were Ogoni who had rallied behind Saro-Wiwa in the early 1990s.

In 1998, Gen. Abacha died of an apparent heart attack.

Aggressive Accounting Practices

Though Cheney’s five-year tenure at the helm of Halliburton made him a rich man, controversies surrounding the Houston-based company have continued to dog him since he became George W. Bush’s Vice President.

During the 2004 presidential campaign, the company agreed to a $7.5 million settlement with the SEC over suspect accounting practices that took place during Cheney’s affiliation with the company.

The SEC said Halliburton changed the way it accounted for construction revenues in 1998 and did not report that change to investors for more than a year, a violation of securities rules.

The accounting sleight-of-hand by Halliburton caused the company's public statements regarding its income in 1998 and 1999 to be materially misleading, boosting Halliburton's paper profits by $120 million.

"In the absence of any disclosure, the investing public was deprived of a full opportunity to assess Halliburton's reported income more particularly, the precise nature of that income, and its comparability to Halliburton's income in prior periods," the SEC said.

The changes to the company's accounting practices led to a "significant difference in their respective effects on Halliburton's financial presentation: the new practice reduced losses on several large construction projects" and allowed the company to report a higher profit, the SEC said.

The accounting practices, which gave Wall Street the false impression that the oil-field services company was profitable between 1998 and 1999, boosted the value of Halliburton's stock and helped Cheney earn more than $35 million when he sold his shares in 2000.

The New York Times quoted two former Dresser Industries executives in a May 22, 2002, story as saying that after Cheney guided the merger of Dresser with Halliburton in 1998, Halliburton "instituted aggressive accounting practices to obscure its losses."

The accounting change altered the way Halliburton booked revenues from cost overruns on construction projects. Previously, the company waited until a figure was agreed upon with a client. After 1998, however, Halliburton booked revenues that it assumed a customer would pay even though the agreed-upon number might turn out to be lower.

Halliburton spokeswoman Wendy Hall said at the time that Cheney "was aware we accrued revenue on unapproved claims in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles."

The gimmick, signed off on by the now-defunct accounting firm Arthur Andersen, allowed Halliburton to add $89 million in revenues to its books in 1998, helping the company beat its earnings target by 2 cents a share for the year and boosting its stock value.

If the accounting change hadn't been employed, said Wall Street analysts, the company would have missed its earnings target by 11 cents a share, which would surely have depressed the stock price.

During Cheney's tenure, accounting irregularities at the company exceeded $234 million, according to documents obtained by the watchdog group Center for Public Integrity.

Halliburton also faced allegations that it over-billed for work at Fort Ord in California under Cheney's watch, a complaint similar to more recent charges that Halliburton padded its military contract work in Iraq.

Following revelations that Cheney made $35 million from his sales of Halliburton stock before the company's share price fell on the announcement in 2000 that the company was being investigated, the Washington Post on July 16, 2002, summed up Cheney's tenure at Halliburton this way:

"The developments at Halliburton since Cheney's departure leave two possibilities: Either the vice president did not know of the magnitude of problems at the oilfield services company he ran for five years, or he sold his shares in August 2000 knowing the company was likely headed for a fall."

As Halliburton's CEO, Cheney was responsible for Halliburton's books. He also went out of his way to praise the work done for Halliburton by Arthur Andersen, the accounting firm that unraveled in 2002 after it was found guilty of obstruction of justice for destroying documents for another energy-related client, Enron.

In a 1996 promotional video for Arthur Andersen, Cheney praised the firm for its business advice.

"One of the things I like that they do for us is that, in effect, I get good advice, if you will, from their people based upon how we're doing business and how we're operating, over and above the, just sort of the normal by-the-books audit arrangement," he said.

The SEC questioned Cheney during its two-year-long probe of Halliburton’s accounting irregularities and concluded that he should not be held responsible for what went on behind the scenes at Halliburton.

Investigative reporter Jason Leopold is the author of News Junkie, a memoir. Visit http://www.newsjunkiebook.com for a preview.

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The GetUp Mob - From Little Things Big Things Grow

Some of the nation's best-known performers have come together to create a song that harnesses the momentum of February's apology to make sure 'sorry' is only the first step towards Indigenous equality. 'The GetUp Mob', featuring Kev Carmody, Paul Kelly, Urthboy, Missy Higgins, Mia Dyson, Ozi Batla and more, have released a new version of the classic "From Little Things Big Things Grow". Now we want your help to make it a number one hit!

If together we top the charts, this message will rocket around the country's airwaves and TV screens on high rotation to an audience of millions - and it costs you just a $1.69 online to achieve that goal. Our power is in numbers, our message can inspire reconciliation. Click here now to view it (for free) and buy the world's newest history-making song:

www.getup.org.au/campaign/MakeThisAHit

From little things, big things grow. This song can fill every home, cafe, pub and workplace in the country with a message of hope that we will achieve reconciliation and equality for all Australian citizens. So lets put it at the top of the charts. You don't have to be powerful or well-connected: with tens of thousands of us all chipping in a little (it costs just a $1.69 to buy online and be registered on the ARIA charts), we can speak to an audience of millions.

Featuring Kev Carmody, Paul Kelly, Urthboy, Missy Higgins, Mia Dyson, Ozi Batla, John Butler and the voices of Kevin Rudd and Paul Keating and more, this clip joins a proud tradition of achieving positive change through music. All profits raised by the song will go to GetUp's Reconciliation Fund and Aboriginal organisations on the ground.

www.getup.org.au/campaign/MakeThisAHit

There is a real danger the momentum and goodwill created earlier this year on Indigenous issues will peter out if we don't keep this issue on the agenda. What better way to do that than send it straight to number one on the charts? The track only costs $1.69, but please feel free to donate as much as you feel appropriate.

Please, make sure you and all your friends are part of this chapter in Australian musical, political and social history by purchasing your copy of The GetUp Mob's "From Little Things Big Things Grow" today.

www.getup.org.au/campaign/MakeThisAHit

Thanks for helping make history,



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$6m Catholic Church payout for abuse in Maitland-Newcastle

The Catholic Church has paid at least $6 million to victims of pedophile priests in Maitland-Newcastle diocese, including some of the greatest known individual compensation payouts in Australia to children sexually abused by clergy.

The great number of church sexual assault victims in Australia has prompted victims' support group Broken Rites spokesman Wayne Chamley to call on Pope Benedict XVI to issue a formal papal apology when he arrives for World Youth Day in July, similar to his apology in the United States last week to abuse victims in that country.

Those connected to the payouts are bound by confidentiality agreements with the Maitland-Newcastle diocese but The Herald has been able to confirm that at least $6 million has been paid to victims of pedophile priests Father Vince Ryan, the late Father Jim Fletcher and the late Father Denis McAlinden.

Most of the money was paid to victims of Father Ryan, who were sexually abused by the priest between 1972 and 1991 after church representatives who were told of his offending in 1975 "decided to do nothing".

Father Ryan's victims received hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The average church payment to victims is about $40,000.

The church is preparing to face a new round of compensation claims following Herald articles last year that concluded with an unprecedented statement from the church acknowledging Father McAlinden as a serial child molester.

Four of the priest's victims have begun legal action.

Another 17 of Father McAlinden's victims have sought counselling with Maitland-Newcastle diocese's Zimmerman House.

One of two Newcastle sisters abused by the priest in the 1960s, who received a personal apology from Bishop of Maitland-Newcastle Michael Malone late last year, said she was seeking compensation because the church let her down.

The priest sexually abused her on a number of occasions when she was aged between 8 and 12.

On at least one occasion she was sexually abused while saying confession to him.

"I don't care if I only get one dollar but I feel like they just want us older victims to be silent and go away so they can forget about us and I don't want that to happen," she said.

The woman was aware of another victim of Father McAlinden's who was taking legal action.

"She has a sister who was a victim of McAlinden's as well," she said.

"He liked siblings up to about the age of 12 until they got too old for him."

Broken Rites researcher Bernard Barrett said payments in the hundreds of thousands of dollars to Hunter pedophile priest victims made Maitland-Newcastle diocese "one of the more spectacular of the dioceses in terms of sexual abuse cases, along with Ballarat, in Victoria".

"Payments of hundreds of thousands of dollars are extraordinary in these kinds of cases, because the average pedophile priest abuse compensation payouts are $40,000," he said.

The extremely high payments to Father Ryan's victims concerns the church's breach of its duty of care towards children.

Zimmerman House manager Helen Keevers said the diocese provided a range of support services to abuse victims.

These include referral and payment for counselling services, fortnightly meditation sessions, meetings with Bishop Malone at which a personal apology is offered by the bishop on behalf of the Catholic Church, advocacy with external agencies on behalf of survivors, facilitation of financial settlements or in-kind support and a range of alternative therapies such as music, art and gardening.

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The Bush Team's Geneva Hypocrisy

By Jason Leopold
April 25, 2008

Newly released U.S. government documents, detailing how Bush administration officials punched legalistic holes in the Geneva Convention’s protections of war captives, stand in stark contrast to the outrage some of the same officials expressed in the first week of the Iraq War when Iraqi TV interviewed several captured American soldiers.

Then, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, President George W. Bush and other administration officials orchestrated a chorus of outrage, citing those TV scenes as proof of the Iraq’s government contempt for international law in general and the Geneva Convention in particular.

“It is a blatant violation of the Geneva Convention to humiliate and abuse prisoners of war or to harm them in any way. As President Bush said yesterday, those who harm POWs will be found and punished as war criminals,” Pentagon spokeswoman Victoria Clarke said on March 24, 2003.

That same day, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz told the BBC that “the Geneva Convention is very clear on the rules for treating prisoners. They're not supposed to be tortured or abused, they're not supposed to be intimidated, they're not supposed to be made public displays of humiliation or insult, and we're going to be in a position to hold those Iraqi officials who are mistreating our prisoners accountable, and they've got to stop.”

At a March 25, 2003, press briefing about progress in the U.S.-led invasion, Secretary Rumfeld said, “This war is an act of self defense, to be sure, but it is also an act of humanity. … In recent days, the world has witnessed further evidence of their [Iraqi] brutality and their disregard for the laws of war. Their treatment of coalition POWs is a violation of the Geneva Conventions.”

The U.S. news media also assisted in this one-sided indictment by uncritically reporting the administration’s complaints while staying silent on the fact that just days earlier, American TV had run scenes of captured Iraqi soldiers, some forced to kneel down at gunpoint to be patted down by U.S. soldiers.

This behavior of the U.S. news media during the early phase of the Iraq War fit with its lack of skepticism in the months leading up to the March 19, 2003, invasion as Bush administration officials spoon-fed the press false intelligence alleging secret Iraqi WMD stockpiles and covert links to al-Qaeda terrorists responsible for the 9/11 attacks.

So, perhaps it should have come as no surprise when the U.S. news media treated the TV footage of American POWs as further evidence that Iraq was run by a lawless regime with no respect for the rules of war. [For a contemporaneous account of the POW issue, see Consortiumnews.com’s “International Law a la Carte.”]

Stunning Hypocrisy

In retrospect – now with much more of the documentary record available – the disparity between the administration’s outrage toward the Iraqis for showing the video and the abuse inflicted by the U.S. government on captives from the Iraq and Afghan wars is stunning.

Declassified documents reveal that the Bush administration concocted legal theories to justify sidestepping the Geneva Convention when it came to prisoners incarcerated at Guantanamo Bay, at secret CIA prisons and at various locations in Iraq, including Abu Ghraib where shocking photos were leaked of sexual and physical abuse in 2004.

Indeed, while U.S. government officials were preaching to Iraqis about the rules of war, the Bush administration was seven months into a secret interrogation program that authorized CIA interrogators to question Afghan and al-Qaeda detainees using brutal methods.

The techniques included painful “stress positions,” forced nudity in cold conditions and the simulated drowning of waterboarding, practices that human rights organizations say violated Geneva and anti-torture laws.

The Bush administration also ordered the CIA to engage in “extraordinary renditions,” which involved kidnapping terror suspects and shipping them to countries that are known to practice torture.

If held to the same standards that the Bush administration demanded of the Iraqi military, U.S. officials implicated in these policies would be guilty of violating the Geneva Convention, said Claire Tixeire, a "human rights fellow" with the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York and an attorney.

“They clearly knew that the laws of war were supposed to apply to prisoners apprehended by the United States in Afghanistan and Iraq, but they found every legal loophole to find ways it didn't apply to the U.S. side,” Tixeire said in an interview.

Tixeire, whose organization is defending some of the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, said that while U.S. officials may have had a point in accusing the Iraqi military of violating the Geneva Convention over the TV interviews, the way the U.S. treated Iraqi captives was much worse.

“It’s clear to me these actions came down from the very top,” Tixeire said. “Denying prisoners of war humane treatment is a grave breach of the Geneva Convention. It's a war crime. They put U.S. troops at risk for being treated inhumanely if they were captured.”

When asked recently about the past statements about Iraqi violations of the Geneva Convention, representatives for Clarke, Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld said the now-former officials would not comment for this story.

Anti-Torture Laws

The actions of the Bush administration also flouted the 1984 "Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment," which was approved by 145 nations, including the United States. It declares that:

"No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture."

Moreover, the convention says individuals who resort to torture cannot defend their actions by saying they were acting on orders from superiors and it mandates that torturers be prosecuted wherever they are found.

The United States signed the Convention Against Torture in 1988 under President Ronald Reagan, who hailed it as “a significant step” in preventing torture, which he called “an abhorrent practice unfortunately still prevalent in the world today.”

In a May 20, 1988, message to the U.S. Senate, Reagan noted that “the core provisions of the Convention establish a regime for international cooperation in the criminal prosecution of torturers relying on so-called ‘universal jurisdiction.’”

According to that provision, “each state party is required either to prosecute torturers who are found in its territory or to extradite them to other countries for prosecution.”

It was this Convention, ratified by the Senate in 1994, that Bush administration officials sought to bypass with legal memos, many drafted by John Yoo of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel.

The administration memos argued that the Geneva Convention did not apply to detainees in the “war on terror” and that President Bush’s commander-in-chief powers allowed him to ignore laws in the interest of protecting the nation.

The record now shows that during the same week in March 2003 – when Rumsfeld was publicly berating Iraq for violating the Geneva Convention by broadcasting footage of American POW’s – he was engaged in drafting a top-secret plan that would give military interrogators at Guantanamo wide latitude to use harsher techniques to obtain information from prisoners.

Rumsfeld signed off on the plan on April 2, 2003, according to documents declassified and turned over to the American Civil Liberties Union last month in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.

Though some of the more extreme techniques were dropped as the list was winnowed down to 24 from 35, the final set of interrogation methods Rumsfeld approved still included tactics for isolating and demeaning a detainee, known as "pride and ego down."

Such degrading tactics would appear to contravene the Geneva Convention, which bars abusive or demeaning treatment of captives.

Reports of Abuse

Weeks after the Iraq invasion, human rights groups started receiving information about the abuse of dozens of Iraqi prisoners at Camp Cropper, Camp Bucca and Abu Ghraib, and the deaths of two prisoners, one of whom died of a crushed larynx, and the other with a hard blow to the head.

Amnesty International sent a letter to the head of the U.S. occupation, Paul Bremer, on June 26, 2003, raising concerns about abuses during house searches, treatment during arrest and detention, people being forced to lie face down on the ground; use of hoods or blind folds, exposure to sun and heat for hours, limited amount of water supplied, and lack of proper washing and toilet facilities.

One month later, Amnesty International released a report, "Iraq: memorandum on concerns relating to law and order," warning of allegations of torture and abuse in U.S. prisons, including Abu Ghraib.

"Regrettably, testimonies from recently released detainees held at Camp Cropper and Abu Ghraib Prison do not suggest that conditions of detention have improved," the report said.

There are "a number of reports of cases of detainees who have died in custody, mostly as a result of shooting by members of the Coalition forces." A Saudi national "alleged that he was subjected to beatings and electric shocks."

Photographs backing up these allegations would surface a year later in two investigative news reports, one by Seymour Hersh of The New Yorker and the other by "60 Minutes II," which detailed the systematic abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib.

Months before the worldwide condemnation of the treatment of the Abu Ghraib prisoners, Rumsfeld sent Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller was sent to Baghdad from Guantanamo Bay to “hit back at the [Iraqi] insurgents...through unorthodox means,” according to a May 10, 2004, front-page story in the Washington Post.

"He came up there and told me he was going to 'Gitmoize' the detention operation," turning it into a hub of interrogation, said Brig. Gen. Janis L. Karpinski, then commander of the military prison system in Iraq, according to the Post.

Hersh wrote in The New Yorker’s May 24, 2004, issue that “the roots of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal lie not in the criminal inclinations of a few Army reservists but in a decision, approved last year [2003] by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, to expand a highly secret operation, which had been focused on the hunt for Al Qaeda, to the interrogation of prisoners in Iraq. …

“The solution, endorsed by Rumsfeld and carried out by Stephen Cambone, was to get tough with those Iraqis in the Army prison system who were suspected of being insurgents. … Rumsfeld and Cambone went a step further, [bringing] unconventional methods to Abu Ghraib. … The male prisoners could be treated roughly, and exposed to sexual humiliation.”

Tarnished Image

Amrit Singh, a staff attorney at the ACLU’s Immigrant Rights Project and the co-author of Administration of Torture, added that Rumsfeld and other top Bush administration officials by “holding up the Geneva Convention and saying it did not apply to some prisoners have tarnished the image of the U.S. throughout the world.”

Even after the programs governing interrogations were exposed, Rumsfeld made sure that a loophole in a new Defense Department policy issued in November 2005, which barred torture and called for the "humane" treatment of detainees, gave him and his deputy the authority to override it.

"Intelligence interrogations will be conducted in accordance with applicable law, this directive and implementing plans, policies, orders, directives, and doctrine developed by DoD components and approved by USD (I), unless otherwise authorized, in writing, by the secretary of defense or deputy secretary of defense," the policy says. "USD (I)" refers to the undersecretary of defense for intelligence.

Rumsfeld resigned in November 2006.

Investigative reporter Jason Leopold is the author of News Junkie, a memoir. Visit http://www.newsjunkiebook.com for a preview.

News and politics

United States

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