Abu Ghraib
2004-05-19 22:04:25.387624+00 by Dan Lyke 1 comments
This morning I was going to take the car in for servicing, which didn't come together, but did mean that I spent a long time in the car this morning. And what was on the radio was the Abu Ghraib hearings. I haven't heard that many carefully studied weasels and non-answers in a long time. I'd thought that Billmon's deconstruction of DoD spokesperson Lawrence Di Rita's non-refutation of Sy Hersh's New Yorker article on Abu Ghraib (thanks, Medley) was maybe a bit nitpicky, but these guys engaged in the worst sort of weaseling, and I wish I could find a transcript so I could get the exact words, but I heard quite a few "did you authorize X?" questions answered with "I did not authorize a subset of X to group Y during the timeperiod T1 through T2" which left no doubt in my mind that, at some point, "X" had indeed been authorized.
With that in mind, Rafe had a few things that nobody disputes at this point:
- Torture is part of the interrogation process at Guantanamo.
- The Pentagon sent the guy who set up the torture program at Guantanamo to Iraq to make recommendations on how they could extract more information from prisoners they had captured.
- He ordered that the guards at the prison be placed under the authority of the interrogators, and that the purpose of the guards was to set the conditions for successful interrogation.
- The guards at Abu Ghraib started torturing the prisoners.
Just so we're clear on what people are and aren't managing to squirm clear of.
With that in mind, I send you over to Dan Savage: Paris Hilton Goes to War: The Bush Administration Is Waging a War on Porn While Soldiers Waging War in Iraq Make Porn:
Which brings us to the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. In a story in the New York Times last Saturday, a senior defense department official said that Army investigators had collected "several hundred pictures" as a part of their investigation, "but most do not depict Iraqi prisoner abuse. The vast majority are pornographic pictures involving only American soldiers." This piece of info was dropped into the story toward the end and no further comment was made.