Officials Accuse Each Other in Prison Scandal (Abu Ghraib)

[Rose Siding]

WASHINGTON — A top military police officer and the commander of military interrogators at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq are blaming each other for improper treatment of prisoners who were stripped, abused and sexually humiliated.

Capt. Donald J. Reese, commander of the 372nd Military Police Company, told authorities that he was repeatedly assured by military interrogators that stripping Iraqis of their clothes was an approved tactic they used to "make the detainees uncomfortable."

But Col. Thomas M. Pappas of the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade told authorities that stripping detainees was "inappropriate" and that he had personally ordered prison guards supervised by Reese to "have the detainees put their clothes back on."
...
Scenes of nudity, captured in photographs, are at the heart of the widening inquiry into whether military police guarding the prison — seven of whom have been criminally charged — were solely to blame for the abuses or if military intelligence officials, who conducted interrogations of prisoners, were also culpable.

An Army decision, expected as early as next month, will determine whether others should be charged and whether more senior officers should be investigated.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/iraq/complete/la-fg-ghraib15jul15,1,5138590.story?coll=la-home-headlines

[Judi Lynn]

1. Sounds as if one of them is claiming a partial sense of regret....

Reese said that when he arrived at the prison in October, he was stunned to find so many inmates without clothes in the interrogation wing of Abu Ghraib. "My first reaction was, 'Wow, there is a lot of nude people here,' " he said.

"I was told that it was an MI tactic that was used to make the detainees uncomfortable. There were many people way above my pay grade that walk through that wing and nothing was ever said about it. I was told it was OK, nothing was illegal or wrong about it."

But Reese also accepted responsibility for the seven guards who were charged. "The U.S. Army will probably not recover from this for a long time," he said. "And I am ashamed of what my soldiers did and embarrassed as well."

This REALLY needs to be addressed completely.

[UpInArms]

2. wonder how long it will take to get higher on the food chain?

Reese and Pappas both have been officially reprimanded for not properly supervising their subordinates at the prison near Baghdad.

This summer, Reese testified at a military hearing against one of the guards charged in the case and said that on one occasion, when a detainee died during an interrogation session, he heard Pappas say, "I'm not going to go down alone for this."

In the statements disclosed this week, Reese stressed that Pappas' intelligence operatives were in charge of the prison and that they repeatedly urged guards to step up tactics to soften detainees.

and

For his part, Pappas said Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller, who was in charge of operations at another prison camp at the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, had encouraged the use of dogs, "with or without a muzzle," at Abu Ghraib as a device to get inmates to talk.

"The key findings of his visit were that the interrogators and analysts develop a set of rules and limitations to guide interrogations, and provide dedicated MPs to support interrogations," Pappas said of Miller.

Can we find where Rummy was the one that sent Miller there? hmmmm...

[demoman123]

3. Forever.

They have covered up bigger things than this.

[UpInArms]

4. here we go

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A43708-2004May20.html

excerpt:

In a memo signed on Aug. 18, 2003, the Pentagon's Joint Staff -- acting on a request from Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and his top intelligence aide, Stephen A. Cambone -- ordered Army Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller to conduct an inspection there. Miller, who oversaw the interrogation efforts at the U.S. military base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, finished his tour on Sept. 9 and left behind his own list of interrogation techniques.

[RUMMYisFROSTED]

8. Major General...

Starting to get there. Starting...

[bobbieinok]

5. SEE 'Making Torture Legal' in NY Review of Books ... Anthony Lewis

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/17230

Volume 51, Number 12 · July 15, 2004
Email to a friend

Feature
Making Torture Legal
By Anthony Lewis
1.
Reading through the memoranda written by Bush administration lawyers on how prisoners of the "war on terror" can be treated is a strange experience. The memos read like the advice of a mob lawyer to a mafia don on how to skirt the law and stay out of prison. Avoiding prosecution is literally a theme of the memoranda. Americans who put physical pressure on captives can escape punishment if they can show that they did not have an "intent" to cause "severe physical or mental pain or suffering." And "a defendant could negate a showing of specific intent...by showing that he had acted in good faith that his conduct would not amount to the acts prohibited by the statute."

These quotations are from a draft report to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld by an ad hoc group of lawyers he chose, mostly political appointees in the Defense and other departments, to advise him on interrogation techniques for prisoners at Guantánamo Bay. The report is dated March 6, 2003; on the title page it says, "Classified by: Secretary Rumsfeld."

Another theme in the memoranda, an even more deeply disturbing one, is that the President can order the torture of prisoners even though it is forbidden by a federal statute and by the international Convention Against Torture, to which the United States is a party.

The idea that presidential power overrides treaties and congressional laws appeared soon after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. John Yoo, a professor at the University of California in Berkeley, was then a deputy assistant attorney general. He wrote several memos in late 2001 and then, in collaboration with Robert J. Delahunty, another Justice Department lawyer, an important paper dated January 9, 2002. It was addressed to the Defense Department's general counsel, William J. Haynes II. "Restricting the President's plenary power over military operations (including the treatment of prisoners)" would be "constitutionally dubious," the memo said.

.....
The Defense Department memorandum of March 2003 incorporated the ideas and much of the language in the Bybee memo. It expressed the idea of impervious presidential power in sweeping terms:

(quote)

In order to respect the President's inherent constitutional authority to manage a military campaign,... (the prohibition against torture) must be construed as inapplicable to interrogations undertaken pursuant to his Commander-in-Chief authority.... Congress may no more regulate the President's ability to detain and interrogate enemy combatants than it may regulate his ability to direct troop movements on the battlefield.... Any effort by Congress to regulate the interrogation of unlawful combatants would violate the Constitution's sole vesting of the Commander-in-Chief authority in the President.

(end quote)

much more......

[UpInArms]

6. kick

:kick:

[riverwalker]

7. more "group think"

just like with the CIA and WMD claims, and the media, whenever group thinking, mob mentality, comforming or whatever you want to call it, takes over, BAD SHIT happens. What quality was in the Abu Ghraib whistle blower that made him KNOW (not think or wonder, but in his words, he KNEW) it was wrong, and then act? Why was he the exception, and not the norm? What has happened to this country?
Was it Ronald Laing who said conforming to an insane culture is in itself insanity?