Rolling Stone on Abu Ghraib
Rolling Stone has an article by Osha Gray Davidson that describes some of the info in the 160 "annexes" (6,000 pages) to the US Army's internal Taguba report into conditions at Abu Ghraib prison. These annexes have been provided to Congressional investigators but not--until now--to the general public.
Thanks to Yankeedoodle for signaling this piece.
Davidson's piece is definitely worth reading (if you have a strong stomach.) Not many actual new "revelations" apart from numerous apparently credible statements from previous inmates about rapes by guards and other members of the prison staff of male (and apparently also female) prisoners. And quite a lot more details about incidents like the night that Sgt. Graner, Pvt Lynndie England, and their co-workers took so many photos of all their abuses.
And this:
- According to an internal Army investigation contained in the secret files, the civilian-run Coalition Provisional Authority had hired at least five members of Fedayeen Saddam -- a paramilitary organization of fanatical Saddam loyalists -- to work as guards at the prison. An Iraqi guard, probably one of "Saddam's martyrs," had smuggled the gun and two knives into the prison in an inner tube, placed them in a sheet and tossed them up to the second-story window of Cell 35. In May, when Taguba testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Sen.Wayne Allard asked him a direct question: "Did we have terrorists in the population at this prison?" Taguba answered, "Sir, none that we were made aware of." His own files make clear, however, that a more accurate response would have been: "Yes, sir -- but only among the guards."
If Sen. Warner and all the other Congressional people who've been trying to investigate and reform this whole situation want to be taken seriously by us taxpayers, then I suggest they should at the very least require that Generals Fast and Miller be reassigned from their current positions-- at the double!
Abu Ghraib was a pity, but the guilt of just "a few bad apples," is the verdict of the Army and (evidently) of US opinion. Most people I know simply prefer to "close the (nasty) book" and think no more.
The key consequence will be tighter restriction of digital cameras among US troops or visitors to "sensitive" sights. The principal crime, according to some, was to disgrace the country by distributing the images. Most profess indignation about the "abuse" (never say torture). However, they are liable to blame this on slattern individuals, the pervasiveness of pornography, or the abolition of school prayer. None would credit or imagine that it stemmed from a policy to "gitmo-ize" the prison and borrow interrogation concepts from other intelligence agencies, applying ideas from Patai on the Arabs' obsessive phobia of sexual humiliation.
Plea bargains offered light sentences in exchange for the bad apple privates' amnesia about who was present or gave orders. Better a few months in the slammer than the duress of an extended trial, a longer sentence, and the likelihood that no high level officers would be tried or convicted. To what end? When the sentence is over, with dishonorable discharges and poor job prospects, life's problems won't be better, and possibly even worse.
If one is to believe "letters to the editor" appearing in various newspapers, a significant element of people believe that rough interrogation, intimidation, humiliation, fear, and discomfort (aka torture) are legitimate tools to break or interdict terror. There is comparative indifference to whether the detainees may be ignorant or whether pain simply induces false confessions, so long as they reinforce official policy. The interrogator will never say, "Take THAT. Now speak. Out with it! Did you, you dirty Al Qaeda rat, WANT the US to invade Iraq to ruin its relations with the Muslim world?"
Finally, there is the sorry and probably intractable problem of dealing with a foe that kills civilians with impunity and where conventional police procedures are defective or non-existent.