Taguba Report: Systemic Torture of Iraqi POWs For Months

That would be an *interpreter*.

 

Man, what a beach ball. Nice job!

 

Agreed, and it also makes me question the leadership all the way to the top. How is it that as of 5/4/04 Rumsfeld still hadn't read the report? Half of us have read it on the internet, and Rumsfeld still hasn't read it? The day before Gen. Meyers still hadn't read it either. Why are the people at the top the last to read it, and not among the first? If Rumsfeld is running things at the Pentagon, he's doing a poor job of it.

Furthermore Gen. Miller was the man in charge of prisons at the time that ordered the MP's to be enablers to the intel people. Then he wasn't in Iraq, but now that this story comes out he's sent back in to be in charge of the prisons again!!? These kinds of leadership mistakes are horrible.

What is the plan of action in Iraq? There don't know who they are handing power over to in just over 1 1/2 months, they have flip flopped time and time again on Baath party members and Republican Guard generals having roles that it appears that there is no plan in place at all.

Why set a timetable like June 30th if there was nothing in place for the handover? Why not get the apparatus in place, and then set a date for the handover.

The leadership breakdown has been unbelievable. Rumsfeld who's in charge of the Pentagon, obviously isn't up to the job. I also don't think someone who appoints people like Rumsfeld, Bremmer, etc. is up for their job either. Bush doesn't have a plan at all, and has appointed people without a plan who aren't up to the task at hand. Meanwhile our country's credibility is being ruined, the moral highground is being given away, and our armed forces are being shamed.

This is not satisfactory. It's not good leadership, and it's frustrating to this happening to us when it didn't have to.

 

Either that or they have read it and they're lying for convenience. I don't know which is true, but it makes more sense to me they're lying. Why send them out to answer questions unprepared with even the most basic source material if not so they can make the points they want under cover of ignorance of the most uncomfortable facts. Either Rumsfeld and Meyers are lying or they are woefully incompetent and not the least bit curious about the number one report (prepared by their own people) on the current number one issue in the war on terror. I'd be less troubled (and less surprised) to learn they were just lying about that.

Yeah, it is frustrating. All of this is and none of it had to happen. All those American dead, all those Iraqi dead and tortured because this president just flat felt like it.

 

Man, MacB, you are on a tear with this word. I think this has been the fourth time you have used it in as many days. Not trying to be rude, I just think it is funny how a word can get in our brains. I hope this post doesn't irk you.

 

And that's what's driving me crazy. None of this had to happen. It could have waited, at the very least, until we had a coalition comparable to Gulf War I and UN approval... if it had to occur at all.

And now we're supposed to spend our blood and treasure correcting a chaos of Bush's own making. We're supposed to stay indefintely until the job is done and not "cut and run". We're supposed throw away our high standing in the world, hard won, for a cavalier act by an incompetent President. We're supposed to endanger the few allies we have in the region with this fiasco. We're supposed to acquiesce to Bush spitting on our allies in NATO of over 50 years standing for his stupidity. We are supposed to believe that it truly was in our interest to not finish the job of destroying Bin Laden and his cabal of murderers before invading a sovereign country with no clear links to 9/11 or al Qaeda.

By god, for the life of me, how can anyone defend this man after this?

 

What's the point of keeping this guy locked up when we let the guy who stole nuke secrets from the West run wild in Pakistan?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,1209418,00.html

Why being right on WMD is no consolation to Iraqi scientist labelled enemy of America

Chief link to UN weapons inspectors held in solitary confinement for year

Jonathan Steele in Baghdad
Wednesday May 5, 2004
The Guardian

By any measure Amer al-Saadi ought to feel vindicated. The dapper British-educated scientist who was the Iraqi government's main link to the United Nations inspectors before the US invasion repeatedly insisted that Iraq had destroyed its weapons of mass destruction years earlier.
David Kay, the American inspector who headed the Iraq Survey Group and was sure he would find such weapons when he went to Iraq after the war, now accepts Dr Saadi was right. So does Hans Blix, the chief UN inspector, who up to a month before the war still thought Iraq might have had WMD.

Yet, astonishingly, Dr Saadi does not know of their change of mind or of the political fallout their views have caused in western countries. He is like a lottery winner who is the last person to be told he has hit the jackpot.

Held in solitary confinement in an American prison at Baghdad's international airport, Dr Saadi is denied the right to read newspapers, listen to the radio, or watch television.

"In the monthly one-page letters I am allowed to send him through the Red Cross I cannot mention any of this news. I can only talk about family issues," says his wife, Helma, as she sits in the couple's home less than half a mile from US headquarters in Baghdad.
.
.
.

 

We probably keep him locked up, just because he was right and might be able to produce proof that the wmd were destroyed.

Bush and Rumsfeld prefer to let the dittoheads think they still might be found.

Remember
centrifuge lol

 

Press Releasse from the State Department...
_______________

Notice to the Press
Office of the Spokesman
Washington, DC
May 4, 2004

Postponement of Release of "Supporting Human Rights and Democracy: The U.S. Record 2003-2004"

The release of "Supporting Human Rights and Democracy: The U.S. Record 2003-2004' scheduled for May 5, 2004 has been postponed for technical reasons that have held up completion of the report. We will announce a new date for the release of the report once it reaches the final stage of printing.

2004/489
[End]

 

Paragraph from the 5/5 LATimes... (sub required to view the whole thing)...
_____________

"White House officials revealed that Bush was made aware in late December or early January of allegations of abuse at the [Abu Ghraib] prison. On Tuesday, national security advisor Condoleezza Rice, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld made statements condemning the abuse, saying the president had demanded that those responsible be held accountable. On Capitol Hill, Democrats and Republicans called for a congressional investigation of the military's handling of the scandal and strongly criticized the Pentagon's failure to inform lawmakers. There also were suggestions that similar problems existed at facilities used to house Afghan war prisoners as early as 2001."

 

Yankee go home and take me with you!

One of the guys in the pictures speaks :
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2004/05/05/MNGUL6FVGK1.DTL

'We were just ordinary people'
Hayder Sabbar Abd, a former inmate at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, says the humiliation he suffered at U.S. hands was so severe he is too ashamed to go home
Baghdad -- The shame is so deep that Hayder Sabbar Abd feels he cannot move back to his old neighborhood. He would prefer not even to stay in Iraq. But now the entire world has seen the pictures, which Abd looked at yet again on Tuesday, pointing out the key figures, starting with three American soldiers wearing big smiles for the camera.

.
.
.
"I can't tell you my feelings," he said. "The Americans got rid of Saddam Hussein. They told us about democracy and freedom. We are happy about that."

But then he tapped the photos again. "Then this man did this to the seven of us," he said. "I am asking: Is that democracy? Is that freedom?"

On Tuesday, he said, he will travel, finally, with his family back to his home in Nasiriya, though he said he cannot stay. He said he would be too ashamed. He wants the U.S. government to pay compensation. He said he feels he needs to move out of Iraq and, despite it all, he said he would not refuse an offer to move to America.

 

Will already has an entire article on this at slate. The Bushies flip flop all over themselves on this issue - at least in public flip, in private flop, again and again.

 

An outside the box solution.

http://www.christiansciencemonitor.com/2004/0505/p09s02-coop.html
US military's bad-guy dragnet - a terrible way to win a war

By Larry Seaquist

GIG HARBOR, WASH. – Prompted by leaked photos, US military leaders confess they learned several months ago of atrocities perpetrated by American soldiers guarding Iraqis held at Abu Ghraib prison, west of Baghdad. The generals now say they are outraged and will punish the guilty few.
Outrage is not enough. Nor will reprimands set things right.

The Army's credibility as a force for good may be the only thing preventing mission failure in Iraq.
.
.
.

This prison system must be abolished immediately. The US will not be free of Abu Ghraib until all captives - including those in Guantánamo - are turned over to some international authority for immediate processing. Lawyers, laws, and courts can sort any criminals. Intelligence must be gained through lawful means. You cannot torture your way to democracy.

As the Army gets out of the coercive prison business it must get into the accountability business.

It is not credible that a few juniors and some sleazy intelligence types worked on their own. For frontline commanders the daily cycle - scour for bad guys, squeeze the detainees, and use whatever information turns up to go after more bad guys - must have become the main engine of each day's work. If the US is to get back to helping Iraqis, not jailing them, the whole military command apparatus in Iraq and its upper branches running all the way to the top of the Pentagon must go under an accountability microscope.

This cannot wait until after the war. Success hinges on restoring the US military's moral stature now. A panel of highly regarded, retired senior officers joined by a couple of standout citizens could run a professional ethics comb through the entire Iraq operation rather quickly. Military law can take care of anything that turns up amiss. Congress should oversee an Operation Restore Military Credibility.

Only through total, self-administered accountability will American troops again be able to look every Iraqi in the eye and say, "Trust me, I'm here to help you, my friend."

 

Not only are the Bushies adopting newspeak and doublethink wholeheartedly, we now have co opted Stalin's prison tactics.



http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1210588,00.html

This is the New Gulag

Bush has created a global network of extra-legal and secret US prisons with thousands of inmates

Sidney Blumenthal
Thursday May 6, 2004
The Guardian

It was "unacceptable" and "un-American", but was it torture? "My impression is that what has been charged thus far is abuse, which I believe technically is different from torture," said Donald Rumsfeld, the secretary of defence on Tuesday. "I don't know if it is correct to say what you just said, that torture has taken place, or that there's been a conviction for torture. And therefore I'm not going to address the torture word."
He confessed he had still not read the March 9 report by Major General Antonio Taguba on "abuse" at the Abu Ghraib prison. Some highlights: " ... pouring cold water on naked detainees; beating detainees with a broom handle and a chair; threatening male detainees with rape ... sodomising a detainee with a chemical light and perhaps a broom stick ... "

The same day that Rumsfeld added his contribution to the history of Orwellian statements by high officials, the Senate armed services committee was briefed behind closed doors for the first time not only about Abu Ghraib, but about military and CIA prisons in Afghanistan. It learned of the deaths of 25 prisoners and two murders in Iraq; that private contractors were at the centre of these lethal incidents; and that no one had been charged. The senators were given no details about the private contractors. They might as well have been fitted with hoods.

Many of them, Democratic and Republican, were infuriated that there was no accountability and no punishment and demanded a special investigation, but the Republican leadership quashed it. The senators want Rumsfeld to testify in a public hearing, but he is resisting and the Republican leaders are blocking it.

The Bush administration was well aware of the Taguba report, but more concerned about its exposure than its contents. General Richard Myers, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, was dispatched on a mission to CBS news to tell it to suppress its story and the horrifying pictures. For two weeks, CBS's 60 Minutes II show complied, until it became known that the New Yorker magazine would publish excerpts of the report. Myers was then sent on to the Sunday morning news programmes to explain, but under questioning acknowledged that he had still not read the report he had tried to censor from the public for weeks.

President Bush, Condoleezza Rice and other officials, unable to contain the controversy any longer, engaged in profuse apologies and scheduled appearances on Arab television. There were still no firings. One of their chief talking points was that the "abuse" was an aberration. But Abu Ghraib was a predictable consequence of the Bush administration imperatives and policies.

Bush has created what is in effect a gulag. It stretches from prisons in Afghanistan to Iraq, from Guantánamo to secret CIA prisons around the world. There are perhaps 10,000 people being held in Iraq, 1,000 in Afghanistan and almost 700 in Guantánamo, but no one knows the exact numbers. The law as it applies to them is whatever the executive deems necessary. There has been nothing like this system since the fall of the Soviet Union. The US military embraced the Geneva conventions after the second world war, because applying them to prisoners of war protects American soldiers. But the Bush administration, in an internal fight, trumped its argument by designating those at Guantánamo "enemy combatants". Rumsfeld extended this system - "a legal black hole", according to Human Rights Watch - to Afghanistan and then Iraq, openly rejecting the conventions.

Private contractors, according to the Toguba report, gave orders to US soldiers to torture prisoners. Their presence in Iraq is a result of the Bush military strategy of invading with a relatively light force. The gap has been filled by private contractors, who are not subject to Iraqi law or the US military code of justice. Now, there are an estimated 20,000 of them on the ground in Iraq, a larger force than the British army.

It is not surprising that recent events in Iraq centre on these contractors: the four killed in Falluja, and Abu Ghraib's interrogators. Under the Bush legal doctrine, we create a system beyond law to defend the rule of law against terrorism; we defend democracy by inhibiting democracy. Law is there to constrain "evildoers". Who doubts our love of freedom?

But the arrogance of virtuous certainty masks the egotism of power. It is the opposite of American pragmatism, which always under stands that knowledge is contingent, tentative and imperfect. This is a conflict in the American mind between two claims on democracy, one with a sense of paradox, limits and debate, the other purporting to be omniscient, even messianic, requiring no checks because of its purity, and contemptuous of accountability.

"This is the only one where they took pictures," Tom Malinowski, Washington advocate of Human Rights Watch, and a former staff member of the National Security Council, told me. "This was not considered a debatable topic until people had to stare at the pictures."

· Sidney Blumenthal is former senior adviser to President Clinton and Washington bureau chief of Salon.com

 

We only caught the stupid ones.
http://wireservice.wired.com/wired/story.asp?section=Breaking&storyId=860833&tw=wn_wire_story

.
.
.
When military investigators were looking into abuses several months ago, they gave U.S. guards a week's notice before inspecting their possessions, several soldiers said.

"That shows you how lax they are about discipline. 'We are going to look for contraband in here, so hint, hint, get rid of the stuff,' that's the way things work in the Guard," Leal said.

 

I just heard on MSNBC that there are photos of an American raping an Iraqi woman, pictures and perhaps video of Americans beating a prisoner nearly to death, and Pictures of Americans watching the Iraqis allied with us raping children.

So these rape and torture and torture rooms carried out by Americans under supervision of Americans is somehow not supposed to be a big deal?