TORTURE AT ABU GHRAIB

By now, you’ve all heard the reports and seen the awful pic­tures of American and British guards hor­ri­bly abus­ing Iraqi pris­on­ers at Abu Ghraib, Saddam’s for­mer tor­ture cham­ber.
Phil Carter looks at the roles of pri­vate con­trac­tors and CIA oper­a­tives in the scan­dal.
Chris Allrbitton said that by strip­ping the pris­on­ers, and mak­ing them per­form homo­sex­ual acts, the American guards “must have had at least an instinc­tual knowl­edge of how awful their abuse would be. They picked a per­fect storm of taboos and humil­i­a­tion and doc­u­mented it! that would enrage the Arab world.“
But in Monday’s New Yorker, Seymour Hersh, goes fur­ther, with the most poten­tially damn­ing story of all.

As the inter­na­tional furor grew, senior mil­i­tary offi­cers, and President Bush, insisted that the actions of a few did not reflect the con­duct of the mil­i­tary as a whole. [An inter­nal Army] report, how­ever, amounts to an unspar­ing study of col­lec­tive wrong­do­ing and the fail­ure of Army lead­er­ship at the high­est lev­els. The pic­ture he draws of Abu Ghraib is one in which Army reg­u­la­tions and the Geneva con­ven­tions were rou­tinely vio­lated, and in which much of the day-​​to-​​day man­age­ment of the pris­on­ers was abdi­cated to Army military-​​intelligence units and civil­ian con­tract employ­ees. Interrogating pris­on­ers and get­ting intel­li­gence, includ­ing by intim­i­da­tion and tor­ture, was the priority. 

May 1st, 2004 | War Update | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.