Today’s Guardian brings another reminder from Seymour Hersh that we are letting the Bush Administration off the hook on Abu Ghraib and it brings into stark relief the necessity of keeping this fight going. Yes, Gonzales has been confirmed, Bush re-elected, but it is still your America too. And we all have a right & obligation to keep the pressure on, demand justice for those “rendered” and incarcerated without due process or Geneva protections around the world.
It’s been a year since Abu Ghraib and what do we know?
The abuse continues unabated. One Commanding Officer has been reprimanded & she claims she’s the patsy. Many, many others have been let off the hook. Message heard loud and clear: Pentagon & WH doesn’t care. Few bad apples and all that.
Hersh revisits Abu Ghraib and tells us that there are many things that we still don’t know yet that he does.
[on the flip]
….
There is much more to be learned. What do I know? A few things stand out. I know of the continuing practice of American operatives seizing suspected terrorists and taking them, without any meaningful legal review, to interrogation centres in south-east Asia and elsewhere. I know of the young special forces officer whose subordinates were confronted with charges of prisoner abuse and torture at a secret hearing after one of them emailed explicit photos back home. The officer testified that, yes, his men had done what the photos depicted, but they – and everybody in the command – understood such treatment was condoned by higher-ups.
What else do I know? I know that the decision was made inside the Pentagon in the first weeks of the Afghanistan war – which seemed “won” by December 2001 – to indefinitely detain scores of prisoners who were accumulating daily at American staging posts throughout the country. At the time, according to a memo, in my possession, addressed to Donald Rumsfeld, there were “800-900 Pakistani boys 13-15 years of age in custody”. I could not learn if some or all of them have been released, or if some are still being held.
A Pentagon spokesman, when asked to comment, said that he had no information to substantiate the number in the document, and that there were currently about 100 juveniles being held in Iraq and Afghanistan; he did not address detainees held elsewhere. He said they received some special care, but added “age is not a determining factor in detention … As with all the detainees, their release is contingent upon the determination that they are not a threat and that they are of no further intelligence value. Unfortunately, we have found that … age does not necessarily diminish threat potential.”
The 10 official inquiries into Abu Ghraib are asking the wrong questions, at least in terms of apportioning ultimate responsibility for the treatment of prisoners. The question that never gets adequately answered is this: what did the president do after being told about Abu Ghraib? It is here that chronology becomes very important.
[snip – go read the article, it’s classic, haunting, detailed, Hersh (not as long as his New Yorker pieces & he excerpts the story of the tatooed soldier from “Chain of Command”)]
Three days later the army began an investigation. But it is what was not done that is significant. There is no evidence that President Bush, upon learning of the devastating conduct at Abu Ghraib, asked any hard questions of Rumsfeld and his own aides in the White House; no evidence that they took any significant steps, upon learning in mid-January of the abuses, to review and modify the military’s policy toward prisoners. I was told by a high-level former intelligence official that within days of the first reports the judicial system was programmed to begin prosecuting the enlisted men and women in the photos and to go no further up the chain of command.
[all emphasis mine]
Abu Ghraib alone should have brought down this Administration. No WMDs and an illegal war should have brought them down. Maybe it’s religious fervor that will finally do it… but only if we keep the pressure on all of these important issues.
