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Tuesday, Nov 10, 2009
The Bush administration has created a gulag that stretches from Afghanistan to Iraq, from Guantanamo to secret CIA prisons around the world.
May 6, 2004 | It was "unacceptable" and "un-American," but was it torture? "My impression is that what has been charged thus far is abuse, which I believe technically is different from torture," Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said on Tuesday. "I don't know if it is correct to say what you just said, that torture has taken place, or that there's been a conviction for torture. And therefore I'm not going to address the torture word." He confessed that he had still not read the March 9 report by Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba on the "abuse" at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Some highlights: "pouring cold water on naked detainees; beating detainees with a broom handle and a chair; threatening male detainees with rape ... sodomizing a detainee with a chemical light and perhaps a broom stick."
The same day that Rumsfeld added his contribution to the history of Orwellian statements by high officials, the Senate Armed Services Committee was briefed behind closed doors for the first time not only about Abu Ghraib but also about military and CIA prisons in Afghanistan. The senators learned of the deaths of 25 prisoners and two murders in Iraq, that private contractors were at the center of these lethal incidents, and that no one had been charged. They were not given any details about the private contractors -- not even how many there are. The senators might as well have been fitted with hoods.
Many of the senators, Democratic and Republican alike, were infuriated that there was no accountability and no punishment and demanded a special investigation, but the Republican leadership quashed it. The senators have called Rumsfeld to testify before the committee on Friday.
The Bush administration was well aware of the Taguba report but was more concerned about its exposure than its contents. Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was dispatched on a mission to CBS News to tell the network to suppress its story and the horrifying pictures. For two weeks, CBS's "60 Minutes II" complied, until it became known that the New Yorker would be publishing excerpts of the Taguba report in its May 10 issue. Myers was then sent on the Sunday morning news programs to explain, but under questioning he acknowledged that he had still not read the report he had tried to censor from the public for weeks.
President Bush, Condoleezza Rice and other White House officials, unable to contain the controversy any longer, engaged in profuse apologies and scheduled appearances on Arab television. There were still no firings. One of their chief talking points was that the "abuse" was an aberration. They pleaded for belief in their virtuous intentions. But Abu Ghraib was a predictable consequence of the Bush administration's imperatives and policies. "This is the only [occasion on which] they took pictures," Tom Malinowski, Washington advocate for Human Rights Watch and a former staff member of the National Security Council, told me. "This was not considered a debatable topic until people had to stare at the pictures."
