“The unspeakable brutality detailed in [the NYT story*] stems directly — absolutely directly — from George W. Bush himself,” writes Chris Floyd, a noted journalist. Among today’s stories:

  • “A leaked report on a military investigation into two killings of detainees at a US prison in Afghanistan has produced new evidence of connivance of senior officers in systematic prisoner abuse”
  • A Univ of Minnesota bioethicist has found that two death certificates were issued for the Afghani taxi driver to cover up his death
  • Sweden, a nation known for its human rights, is further implicated in U.S. rendition to nations that torture U.S. detainees

Worldwide, the accounts of detainee abuses “ricochet around the world,” writes the NYT today, “instilling ideas about American power and justice, and sowing distrust of the United States.”

Meanwhile, the U.S. media abets the diversion tactics of a single-paragraph Newsweek story and photos of Saddam that only Helen Gurley Brown would find titillating.

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* “In U.S. Report, Brutal Details of 2 Afghan Inmates’ Deaths,” NYT, May 20, 2005


More below:

Yesterday afternoon, I watched MSNBC’s Connected. The show’s promo reads:

[M]ore on the fallout from the Saddam underpants fiasco. We’ve got bloggers Rahul Mahajan of “Empire Notes” and John Hinderaker from “Powerline.”

There wasn’t a word — in the promo, in the intros, or in the questions — about the NYT leak of the classified military investigation. The question for the show’s daily poll was “Was it right for a British newspaper to publish photos of Saddam Hussein in his underwear?”

I watched as Rahul Mahajan of the EmpireNotes.org blog attempted to bring up the NYT story, only to be drowned out — literally — by a deafening cacophony of over-speak by Hinderaker and the rightwing host filling in for regular Monica Crowley.

Even the “left” host, Ron Reagan, dodged the story, steering the two bloggers back — over and over — to the Saddam-in-underpants photos. (To lighten their load even more, MSNBC interviewed comedian David Brenner for his take on the photos. Brenner noted that Saddam is “well hung” but that Muslims would find the photos embarrassing.)

I visited Rahul Mahajan’s Empire Notes blog to learn more:

[H]ow about the strangest irony of this whole misbegotten war? Saddam gets the protection of the Geneva Conventions, but the thousands of poor souls in Guantanamo, Afghanistan, Iraq, and undisclosed locations around the world do not.

On the front page of the New York Times today, you can read about the fate of one of those men — “Even as the young Afghan man was dying before them, his American jailers continued to torment him.” Routinely left handcuffed and hanging from the ceiling for hours, the young man, a farmer and part-time taxi driver named Dilawar, was subjected to repeated knee strikes in the soft tissues of his lower body, until, said the coroner who looked at his corpse, he looked like “an individual run over by a bus.” Most of his interrogators, apparently, were convinced that he had nothing to do with attacks on American forces.

If only the news media were to decide that any of those things was also a Real Story.

Here are some of the “Real Stories”:

(1) Muslims around the world feel like they’re “dirt”:

For many Muslims, Guantánamo stands as a confirmation of the low regard in which they believe the United States holds them. For many non-Muslims, regardless of their feelings toward the United States, it has emerged as a symbol of American hypocrisy.

“The cages, the orange suits, the shackles – it’s as if they’re dealing with something that’s like a germ they don’t want to touch,” said Daoud Kuttab, director of the Institute of Modern Media at Al Quds University in Ramallah, in the West Bank. “That’s the nastiness of it.” (NYT)

(2) The spectre of U.S. abuses has deeply affected politics in countries around the world:

Guantánamo provides rhetorical fodder for politicians seeking to bring down United States-allied rulers in their own countries, and it offers a ready rallying point against American dominance, even in countries whose own police and military have been known for severe violations of human rights.

“Even illiterate people pronounce it in a perfect manner, which surprises me a bit, quite frankly,” said Irfan Siddiqui, a columnist for Pakistan’s popular Urdu-language daily, Nawa-i-Waqt. “But it shows the significance this issue has attained.” (NYT)

(3) The photos of Saddam’s capture were far more disturbing to the Iraqi people, and Muslims, than these latest Sun tabloid photos:

[W]hen Saddam was captured in December 2003; then, TV viewers were besieged with endless replays of Saddam having a tongue depressor jammed in his mouth.

I was in Iraq about a month later. Iraqis I spoke to, almost universally, felt deeply shamed and humiliated, both by the circumstances of his capture, and by having to see the clip. One young woman, a rather apolitical Assyrian Christian, told me, “That was the first time I felt ashamed to be an Iraqi.”

For the U.S. news media, it was simply displayed as a trophy, a metaphorical head stuck on the wall. The display required no collusion or even thought from TV news editors, just reflexive pandering to the lowest common denominator. […..]

This [photos of Saddam’s capture] was then to break their spirit and will to resist. It’s hard to know if U.S. government officials were that sophisticated; what is clear is that the majority of Iraqis believed this. (Empire Notes)

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These are among the real stories — listed above the fold of this diary — that the U.S. media should be headlining today, repeatedly mentioning, and discussing with pundits:

(A) “A leaked report on a military investigation into two killings of detainees at a US prison in Afghanistan has produced new evidence of connivance of senior officers in systematic prisoner abuse”:

Report implicates top brass in Bagram scandal, Julian Borger in Washington for The Guardian, Saturday May 21, 2005

The investigation shows the military intelligence officers in charge of the detention centre at Bagram airport were redeployed to Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq in 2003, while still under investigation for the deaths of two detainees months earlier. Despite military prosecutors’ recommendations, the officers involved have yet to be charged.

We at Daily Kos, and readers of Mother Jones, already knew this.

From my March 2, 2005 diary, “Bagram to Abu Ghraib: ‘Aren’t you kind of babying them?'”

Out of Bazelon’s March/April 2005 Mother Jones article, we glean these observations:

  • “it was at Bagram” — a desolate desert U.S. air base in Afghanistan — “that interrogators devised and tested the methods that would shame the United States in Iraq”
  • “Captain Carolyn Wood, a 34-year-old officer and 10-year Army veteran … rewrote the interrogation policy set by [the previous interrogation] group, adding to it nine techniques not approved by military doctrine or included in Army field manual”
  • “instead of disciplining those involved” in the abuses at Bagram air base, “the Pentagon transferred key personnel from Afghanistan” to Abu Ghraib
  • had the abuses at bases in Afghanistan (there are many Bagrams there) been investigated promptly, the abuses at Abu Ghraib might have been prevented
  • “with the attention of the media and Congress focused on Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, the problems in Afghanistan seem to be continuing

I urge you to reread this diary because I also investigate, further, the abusive methods devised by 10-year-veteran Capt. Carolyn Wood. I also checked into the testimony that Capt. Wood gave at the trial of Lynndie England.

Capt. Wood implicated higher-ups: “[Wood] told the court that Col. Thomas Pappas, the commander of the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade, visited Tier 1, where much of the abuse was allegedly meted out around the clock.”

But, to date, “[o]nly seven soldiers have been charged, all junior ranks,” reports The Guardian today.

John Galligan, a Texas lawyer defending one of them – Private First Class Willie Brand – told the Guardian: “It happened over a period of time and involved a large number of individuals. To turn around and charge PFC Brand fails to take account of the environment and standard operating procedures.


“What is particularly offensive to me is that senior officials have gone unscathed.”

(B) A Univ of Minnesota bioethicist has found that two death certificates were issued for the Afghani taxi driver to cover up his death:

Dr. Steven Miles, a University of Minnesota bioethicist who has been investigating alleged human rights abuses by U.S. military medical personnel in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The two death certificates, dated 17 months apart, both document the death of a 22-year-old taxi driver who was arrested by Afghan militiamen in December 2002. He was turned over to a U.S. detention center in Bagram, where he apparently died under interrogation a week later.

Both classify Dilawar’s death as a homicide. But in one death certificate, he is a Caucasian of unspecified age and religion. In the other, he is a Muslim of “approximately 35 years,” who was “found unresponsive in his cell while in custody.”

Miles believes the twin death certificates — one of them clearly altered — are evidence of a cover-up. Pentagon officials say they’ve investigated Dilawar’s death, along with at least two dozen other suspected criminal homicides, and have charged seven people. (Minneapolis Star-Tribune, May 21, 2005 – free subscription) via Raw Story

By the way, Miles is writing a book on this. I can’t wait.

(C) Sweden, a nation known for its human rights, is further implicated in U.S. rendition to nations that torture U.S. detainees:

You’ll recall you heard this story on CBS’s “60 Minutes” and I diaried that program

U.N. Finds Sweden Broke Torture Convention

GENEVA — Sweden broke international law when it sent a terror suspect home to Egypt despite his protests that he would be tortured there, a United Nations human rights body found Friday. (Newsday, May 20, 2005)

STOCKHOLM — The CIA Gulfstream V jet touched down at a small airport west of here just before 9 p.m. on a subfreezing night in December 2001. A half-dozen agents wearing hoods that covered their faces stepped down from the aircraft and hurried across the tarmac to take custody of two prisoners, suspected Islamic radicals from Egypt.

Inside an airport police station, Swedish officers watched as the CIA operatives pulled out scissors and rapidly sliced off the prisoners’ clothes, including their underwear, according to newly released Swedish government documents and eyewitness statements. They probed inside the men’s mouths and ears and examined their hair before dressing the pair in sweat suits and draping hoods over their heads. The suspects were then marched in chains to the plane, where they were strapped to mattresses on the floor in the back of the cabin.

So began an operation the CIA calls an “extraordinary rendition,” the forcible and highly secret transfer of terrorism suspects to their home countries or other nations where they can be interrogated with fewer legal protections.

The practice has generated increasing criticism from civil liberties groups; in Sweden a parliamentary investigator who conducted a 10-month probe into the case recently concluded that the CIA operatives violated Swedish law by subjecting the prisoners to “degrading and inhuman treatment” and by exercising police powers on Swedish soil.

“Should Swedish officers have taken those measures, I would have prosecuted them without hesitation for the misuse of public power and probably would have asked for a prison sentence,” the investigator, Mats Melin, said in an interview. Washington Post, May 21, 2005

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At his blog, Empire Burlesque, Chris Floyd — an American journalist and columnist for The Moscow Times and St. Petersburg Times implores us:

If you are an American with even one drop of genuine love for the country in your soul, you cannot read this story without shedding “tears of rage, tears of grief,” in Bob Dylan’s haunting words. What have they done to us, these snarling apes in their thousand-dollar suits? What have they done to us, these sanctimonious killers, mouthing the name of God through teeth flecked with human guts?

What quadrant of hell is hot enough for such men?

Indeed.


What we do, and say, about this story — and the thousands like it — will inform future generations about just how civilized, or cruel, we were.


It’s safe to predict that the U.S. media will be judged complicit in these atrocities.

Cross-posted at Daily Kos.