“Without a comprehensive, independent investigation into the United States’ torture and ill-treatment of detainees, the conditions remain for further abuses to occur, Amnesty International warned today as it released a 200-page report cataloguing the United States’ three-year descent into the use of torture. The report was released 6 months after CBS News first broadcast the photographs of torture at Abu Ghraib. […]

“‘Many questions remain unanswered, responsible individuals are beyond the scope of investigation, policies that facilitate torture remain in place, and prisoners continue to be held in secret detention,’ said Dr. William F. Schulz, Executive Director of Amnesty International USA. ‘The failure to substantially change policy and practice after the scandal of Abu Ghraib leaves the US government completely lacking in credibility when it asserts its opposition to torture.’

“In the report […] the organization documents the pattern of human rights violations that run from Afghanistan to Abu Ghraib via Guantç–£amo Bay and extend to ‘secret’ overseas detention facilities. It outlines how, despite the administration’s claims that the atrocities of September 11, 2001, ushered in a ‘new paradigm’ requiring ‘new thinking,’ the US has fallen into a historically familiar pattern of violating human rights in the name of national security.”

(full text here; my emphasis)

Update (11 Nov 04): One of the key architects of the systematic and widespread human rights violations is about to become US Attorney General.