posted by Damozel | General Taguba, the investigator of Abu Ghraib, in an interview in The New Yorker that I wish had shocked me more than it did, states that though he was ordered to confine his investigation to the low-ranking soldiers directly involved, the responsibility goes right up the chain of command. He also says that Rumsfeld misled Congress about what he knew and when.
Subsequently "mocked and shunned" for his report, and "forced to retire early because of his pursuit of the issue," he has now stepped forward to confirm the suspicions of those who believed that "senior Pentagon officials were involved in directing abusive interrogation policies." The Washington Post, Abu Ghraib Investigator Points to Pentagon (17 June 2007). Taguba said: "“The whole idea that Rumsfeld projects—‘We’re here to protect the nation from terrorism’—is an oxymoron.... He and his aides have abused their offices and have no idea of the values and high standards that are expected of them. And they’ve dragged a lot of officers with them.”" The New Yorker, The General's Report (25 June 2007).
Andrew Sullivan at The Daily Dish: "Justice is coming." Is it? I hope so. I tend to doubt it and I don't understand where Sullivan thinks it is coming from. He's religious, I believe; does he mean from God? I don't mean to be cynical, but the 9-page article in The New Yorker just strikes me as a twice-told tale. Maybe I've developed antibodies to my outrage.
General Taguba:
I know that my peers in the Army will be mad at me for speaking out, but the fact is that we violated the laws of land warfare in Abu Ghraib. We violated the tenets of the Geneva Convention. We violated our own principles and we violated the core of our military values. The stress of combat is not an excuse, and I believe, even today, that those civilian and military leaders responsible should be held accountable.” The New Yorker, The General's Report (25 June 2007).
Yes, I do too. I guess I don't think they will. But this is one thing I do know: any actual peers of General Taguba won't be mad at him for telling the truth. They'll honor him for doing his duty and will know exactly where the blame lies. At least I hope so.
Anyway: The salient facts don't take nine pages to address, even though for this particular chain of circumstances the devil really is in the details. There are a lot of them, more than I can process in a single reading. Here's a summary.
As early as January 2004, senior officials in the Pentagon and in Rumsfeld's office had access to information concerning the events at Abu Ghraib. According to the article:
- On January 13, 2004, a military policeman sent a CD containing images of detainees being abused and tortured to the Army's Criminal Investigation Division.
- Two days later, General Craddock (Rumsfeld's senior military assistant) and Vice-Admiral Keating (chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) received a written summary.
- On January 20, 2004, the chief of staff at Central Command sent an email to Keating, which was cc'd to Craddock and to Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, the Army commander in Iraq informing them of four confessions plus a CD of images
The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Myers, acknowledges that in January, ""to me and the Secretary up through the chain of command. . . . And the general nature of the photos, about nudity, some mock sexual acts and other abuse, was described.”" The New Yorker.
Investigating Abu Ghraib, General Taguba was "was overwhelmed by the scale of the wrongdoing. “These were people who were taken off the streets and put in jail—teen-agers and old men and women,” he said. “I kept on asking these questions of the officers I interviewed: ‘You knew what was going on. Why didn’t you do something to stop it?’”The New Yorker. According to the article, some of the most brutish forms of torture which were practiced on the detainees included an interrogator shoving objects up the rectum of a naked, handcuffed detainee as he lay on a wet floor ( The New Yorker) and an American soldier in uniform sodomizing a female detainee. The New Yorker.
He did not believe that the outrageous acts at Abu Ghraib were initiated by soldiers without the knowledge or encouragement of their superiors. ""“From what I knew, troops just don’t take it upon themselves to initiate what they did without any form of knowledge of the higher-ups,” Taguba told me. His orders were clear, however: he was to investigate only the military police at Abu Ghraib, and not those above them in the chain of command. “These M.P. troops were not that creative,” he said. “Somebody was giving them guidance, but I was legally prevented from further investigation into higher authority. I was limited to a box.”" The New Yorker
As a result of his investigation, Taguba came to believe that Lieutenant General Sanchez, who routinely visited the prison in fall 2003 when most of the abuse was occurring, knew exactly what was going on. He further concluded that the outrages committed by the "bad apples" of Abu Ghraib were performed at the behest and/or with the encouragement of intelligence officials who were questioning detainees. He did not believe that the MP's spontaneously decided to torture the prisoners.
“Loosen this guy up for us,” one M.P. said he was told by a member of military intelligence. “Make sure he has a bad night.”
The M.P.s, Taguba said, “were being literally exploited by the military interrogators. My view is that those kids”—even the soldiers in the photographs—“were poorly led, not trained, and had not been given any standard operating procedures on how they should guard the detainees.”The New Yorker.
According to General Taguba, he was invited to meet with Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld for the first time on May 6, 2004 (the day before Rumsfeld and his staff testified before the Senate and the House Armed Services Committees ). At the meeting, Rumsfeld astonished Taguba by telling him that he had not yet seen the report. All officials present "professed ignorance" about the events of Abu Ghraib, even though Taguba had submitted "more than a dozen copies of his report through several channels at the Pentagon and to the Central Command headquarters."
At the May 7, 2004 hearing Rumsfeld testified that he hadn't had access to the reports till the day before. When someone specifically asked him if he'd seen the photos, he said there "were rumors of photographs in a criminal prosecution chain" in January, but though the "legal part of it was proceeding along fine," he and the president "didn't know" (about the torture or the extent of the torture; I don't understand the quoted response). At any rate, General Taguba was shocked by Rumsfeld's testimony.
He believed that Rumsfeld’s testimony was simply not true. “The photographs were available to him—if he wanted to see them,” Taguba said. Rumsfeld’s lack of knowledge was hard to credit. Taguba later wondered if perhaps Cambone had the photographs and kept them from Rumsfeld because he was reluctant to give his notoriously difficult boss bad news. But Taguba also recalled thinking, “Rumsfeld is very perceptive and has a mind like a steel trap. There’s no way he’s suffering from C.R.S.—Can’t Remember Shit. He’s trying to acquit himself, and a lot of people are lying to protect themselves.” It distressed Taguba that Rumsfeld was accompanied in his Senate and House appearances by senior military officers who concurred with his denials.The New Yorker.
Rumsfeld, at the May 7th hearing: "“It breaks our hearts that in fact someone didn’t say, ‘Wait, look, this is terrible. We need to do something,’ ” Rumsfeld told the congressmen. “I wish we had known more, sooner, and been able to tell you more sooner, but we didn’t.”"
Subsequently,
[a] former high-level Defense Department official said that, when the Abu Ghraib scandal broke, Senator John Warner, then the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, was warned “to back off” on the investigation, because “it would spill over to more important things.” A spokesman for Warner acknowledged that there had been pressure on the Senator, but said that Warner had stood up to it—insisting on putting Rumsfeld under oath for his May 7th testimony, for example, to the Secretary’s great displeasure. The New Yorker.
What were the "more important things" that those who did the warning were afraid the Abu Ghraib investigation might shed light on? The article discusses some of them. Apparently, senior officials were pleased that the Abu Ghraib focused on the military police. "” A Pentagon consultant on the war on terror also said that the “basic strategy was ‘prosecute the kids in the photographs but protect the big picture.’ ” The New Yorker .
Weary of blaming Bush, I've decided to blame Clinton. When---when--- will the nation get to stop paying the price for those moments of merry carnality with Monica and his lie to the American people (in blatant disrespect for the rule of law)? The cost is increasing faster than the national debt. If you think about it, Bush is Clinton's fault. Hey, it works for certain conservatives.
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