You know that "Bush, along with Defense Secretary Rumsfeld and Attorney General John Ashcroft, signed off on a secret system of detention and interrogation that opened the door to such methods. It was an approach that they adopted to sidestep the historical safeguards of the Geneva Conventions."
Same deal with Gitmo, of course. BTW, only one corpse photo was released to the public. The photographs the Congress people saw showed "soldiers laughing over dead Iraqis whose bodies had been abused and mutilated." Multiple. And still you write, "It could have been torture, at least in a few cases. But who really knows." That amazes me. If that handful of photos hadn't been released, you'd still be denying it.In fact you were denying it after the photos were released.
Almost all of the survivors of Abu Ghraib were released after the exposure. They'd been picked up in "sweeps," and there was no evidence against them. Karpinski estimated later that 90% of the detainees were innocent. She denied that she knew what was going on because interrogation was sub-contracted to the Israelis. Said she was not even allowed entry into the interrogation rooms. By whom? The few rotten apples?
"The Roots of Torture
The road to Abu Ghraib began after 9/11, when Washington wrote new rules to fight a new kind of war. A NEWSWEEK investigation
Tough tactics: Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld pushed for a Gitmo style approach to prisoner interrogations in Iraq...
May 24 issue, excerpts -
...There were 1,800 slides and several videos, and the show went on for three hours. The nightmarish images showed American soldiers at Abu Ghraib Prison forcing Iraqis to masturbate. American soldiers sexually assaulting Iraqis with chemical light sticks. American soldiers laughing over dead Iraqis whose bodies had been abused and mutilated. There was simply nothing to say...."People were ashen."
...Senate Armed Services Committee chairman John Warner declared the pictures were the worst "military misconduct" he'd seen in 60 years,.... And NEWSWEEK has learned that U.S. soldiers and CIA operatives could be accused of war crimes. Among the possible charges: homicide involving deaths during interrogations. "The photos clearly demonstrate to me the level of prisoner abuse and mistreatment went far beyond what I expected, and certainly involved more than six or seven MPs," said GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham, a former military prosecutor. He added: "It seems to have been planned."
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Exclusive: Read the War Crimes Memos
Indeed, the single most iconic image to come out of the abuse scandal—that of a hooded man standing naked on a box, arms outspread, with wires dangling from his fingers, toes and penis—may do a lot to undercut the administration's case that this was the work of a few criminal MPs. That's because the practice shown in that photo is an arcane torture method known only to veterans of the interrogation trade. "Was that something that [an MP] dreamed up by herself? Think again," says Darius Rejali, an expert on the use of torture by democracies. "That's a standard torture. It's called 'the Vietnam.' But it's not common knowledge. Ordinary American soldiers did this, but someone taught them."...
Who might have taught them? Almost certainly it was their superiors up the line. Some of the images from Abu Ghraib, like those of naked prisoners terrified by attack dogs or humiliated before grinning female guards, actually portray "stress and duress" techniques officially approved at the highest levels of the government for use against terrorist suspects. It is unlikely that President George W. Bush or senior officials ever knew of these specific techniques [Duh. E]....
But a NEWSWEEK investigation shows that, as a means of pre-empting a repeat of 9/11, Bush, along with Defense Secretary Rumsfeld and Attorney General John Ashcroft, signed off on a secret system of detention and interrogation that opened the door to such methods. IT WAS AN APPROACH THAT THEY ADOPTED TO SIDESTEP THE HISTORICAL SAFEGUARDS OF THE GENEVA CONVENTIONS [caps mine; same reason Gitmos is in Cuba]... In doing so, they overrode the objections of Secretary of State Colin Powell and America's top military lawyers—...
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