More on Iraqi Prison Scandal

CHAIN OF COMMAND
by SEYMOUR M. HERSH
How the Department of Defense mishandled the disaster at Abu Ghraib.


Pentagon staff ordered not to read Taguba report, despite it being public and online. Investigation into why it was illegally classified.

Who's responsible for these orders? The undersecretary of defense policy, Douglas Feith.

General Tommy Franks had previously called Feith the "stupidest guy on the face of the earth."


Military Intelligence Officers In Abu Ghraib New, Untrained
Situation Out of Control

Atrios is excerpting a big Baltimore Sun article today.

"There was like a big disconnect at every level," said the other. "Guys were given jobs they had never done, contractors [working as interrogators] are in there acting like they're in the movies. The whole operation was like a chicken with its head cut off."

Though they entered Iraq with no training in interrogation, they were assigned to extract information from prisoners considered of high intelligence value - ranking Baath Party members and suspected insurgents, for example - and report on their findings.

"I don't know where they got this from, but the MPs would say it all the time," one of the soldiers said. "MI would drop off a guy who wasn't talking, and the MP would say, 'So looks like I'll be going cowboy on him' or 'Looks like he needs some wild, wild west.'"

The terms meant beatings, they said, and the military intelligence interrogators and private contractors did nothing to discourage them.

Many of the military intelligence interrogators were paired with private contractors from CACI International and with linguists from Titan Inc. The soldiers said most of those employees seemed to operate with autonomy, seemingly answerable to nobody in the command.

"They would say it right out, that 'we don't answer to you,'" one of the soldiers said. The Taguba report recommended that two of the contractors employed by CACI be dismissed.

el - Note, this was not done in the months since the pentagon had this report.


Senators Set Hearings on Iraq Prisoner Abuse

Wag the Dog - Bush to Impose Sanctions on Syria This Week


Bremer Warned Repeatedly

Iraq's first human rights minister launched a blistering attack yesterday on America's chief administrator in Iraq, Paul Bremer, saying that he had warned him repeatedly last year that US soldiers were abusing Iraqi detainees.


TIME - American Treatment of Prisoners

"That is me," he claims to a Time reporter, as one of the lurid photographs of detained Iraqis suffering sexual humiliation at the hands of U.S. soldiers scrolls down a computer screen. "I felt a mouth close around my penis. It was only when they took the bag off my head that I saw it was my friend." In the nine months he spent in detention, al-Abbadi says he was never charged and never interrogated. On that awful November night, four months after his arrest, he thought he and six other prisoners were being punished for a petty scuffle.

They were herded into Cellblock 1A. The guards cut off their clothes, and then the degrading demands began. Through it all, al-Abbadi knew the Americans were taking photos, he says, "because I saw the flashbulbs go off through the bag over my head." He says he is the hooded man in the picture in which a petite, dark-haired woman in camouflage pants and an Army T shirt gives a thumbs-up as she points to a prisoner's genitals. He says he was in the pileup of naked men ordered to lie on the backs of other detainees as a smiling soldier in glasses looks on. And al-Abbadi says he was told to masturbate, though he was too scared to do more than pretend, as a female soldier flaunted her bare breasts...


Blair Apologizes for Abuses in Iraq

Prime Minister Tony Blair apologized Sunday for any abuses committed by British soldiers in Iraq, and said those responsible would be punished.

As the government acknowledged it had known for months about claims that its troops abused Iraqi prisoners, lawmakers called for the publication of an International Committee of the Red Cross report detailing many of the allegations. Human rights group Amnesty International said it told British officials about reports of violence and torture a year ago.