War Without End

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Who is Behind the Abuse at Abu Ghraib?

By Christopher Bollyn – Rumor Mill News May 6, 2004

Despite extensive coverage, the mainstream media has failed to ask the key questions about the abuse of the Iraqi detainees: Who is really behind the torture and humiliation of the Iraqi prisoners and why was it done?

“I share a deep disgust that those prisoners were treated the way they were treated,” President George W. Bush said about the published photographs of tortured and humiliated Iraqi prisoners from the U.S.-run prison near Baghdad. “Their treatment does not reflect the nature of the American people. That's not the way we do things in America.”

Most Americans would agree that the abuse caught on film at Abu Ghraib prison seems utterly foreign. The media, however, is not exploring the question implied by the president’s statement: If not American, then who is behind the humiliation of the Iraqi prisoners?

While the mainstream media wallows in the details of the abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad it avoids asking the questions that could reveal who is behind the sordid saga.

The lowly Army reservists seen smiling in scenes of abuse appear to be mere actors – useful idiots – in a drama directed by a hidden hand. But who is truly responsible for this drama? And why was it photographed?

A May 5 New York Times article about Hayder Sabbar Abd, a 34-year-old Shiite Iraqi being victimized in the infamous photos, raises the most obvious question: Why was the perverse abuse he and six other simple detainees suffered photographed?

Ordered by the Translator

“The curiosity, through much of the ordeal, was the camera,” Ian Fisher wrote. “It was a detail he mentioned repeatedly as he recalled being forced against a wall and ordered by the Arabic translator to masturbate.” It’s odd that, according to Abd, the translator was giving the orders.

“All the while, he [Abd] said, the flash of the camera kept illuminating the dim room that once held prisoners of Mr. [Saddam] Hussein, recording images that have infuriated the Arab world and badly sullied America’s image.”

It seems unlikely that a group of U.S. Army Military Police [MP] would allow themselves to be filmed indulging in “sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses.” The prisoners being abused in the photos were not being abused prior to interrogation, according to Abd. The mistreatment in the photos “appeared to be punishment for bad behavior,” the Times reported.

“The truth is we were not terrorists,” Abd said. “We were not insurgents. We were just ordinary people. And American intelligence knew that.”

Abd claims that he was never interrogated, and never charged with a crime. Most of the American soldiers had treated him well and with respect. “Americans did not mistreat me in general,” he said. “But these people must be tried.”

Taguba's Investigation

Major General Antonio M. Taguba, who conducted the Army’s investigation into the alleged abuses at Abu Ghraib earlier this year, said Army investigators have “extremely graphic photographic evidence” of abuse in “pictures and videos.”

Taguba’s report says “egregious acts and grave breaches of international law” were committed when an “ambiguous command relationship” existed at the prison. This breakdown in the chain-of-command was due to Fragmentary Order 1108, dated 19 November 2003.

“This effectively made an MI [Military Intelligence] Officer, rather than an MP Officer, responsible for the MP units conducting detainee operations at that facility,” Taguba wrote.

Fragmentary Order 1108 made Col. Thomas M. Pappas, Commander of the 205th MI Brigade, responsible for the MP units at Abu Ghraib prison.

Taguba’s report, which was presented to his superiors in early March, recommended that an investigation be conducted “to determine the extent of culpability of MI personnel.”

Apart from the failings of the senior officers who should have done more to prevent the abuse, Taguba names four individuals as key suspects. “Specifically,” Taguba wrote, “I suspect that Col. Thomas M. Pappas, LTC Steve L. Jordan, Mr. Steven Stephanowicz, and Mr. John Israel were either directly or indirectly responsible for the abuses at Abu Ghraib and strongly recommend immediate disciplinary action.”

Jordan is former director of the Joint Interrogation and Debriefing Center and Liaison Officer to the 205th MI Brigade.

Stephanowicz is a “civilian interrogator” employed by CACI International of Chantilly, Va., and “John Israel” is said to be a “civilian interpreter.” Both were working with the 205th MI Brigade at the time of the abuse. According to the report these private contractors were at times supervising the interrogations.

“In general,” Taguba wrote, “U.S. civilian contract personnel (Titan Corp., CACI, etc.) third country nationals, and local contractors do not appear to be properly supervised within the detention facility at Abu Ghraib.” The third country nationals are not identified in the report.

Although Stephanowicz and Israel are both named as being “directly or indirectly responsible for the abuses at Abu Ghraib,” very little has been said about either of them in the mainstream media. Why are they being overlooked?

Who is John Israel?

The Taguba report isn’t clear about John Israel. In the body of the report he is mistakenly identified as a CACI employee. Only in the annex on the last page is he noted as being with Titan Corp., a high tech military company based in San Diego.

Questions abound about “John Israel.” Ralph Williams, spokesman for Titan Corp., told the Times that Israel “worked for a Titan subcontractor that he would not name.”

“John Israel” is most likely the nom de guerre of an Arabic-speaking intelligence agent who was placed in Iraq through Titan. Both Titan and CACI have directors with strong ties to the Israeli military establishment.

The director of Titan with the largest stake in the company is Edward H. Bersoff, who received the Distinguished Leadership Award by the Washington Chapter of the American Jewish Committee in 1999. Bersoff has been an honored speaker at the Jewish Federation of Greater Washington, along with the likes of Sharon’s right-wing ally Binjamin Netanyahu.

On January 14, Dr. J.P. (Jack) London, chairman, president, and CEO of CACI International, flew to Israel to receive the Albert Einstein Technology Award from the Jerusalem Fund. The award was presented by Israeli Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz and Uri Lupolianski, Jerusalem’s ultra-Orthodox Jewish Mayor at a ceremony in the occupied city on January 14, 2004.

CACI was awarded a $10,118,040 firm-fixed-price contract from the U.S. Army on Feb. 26, 2004 for 24 contract specialists, like Stephanowicz, to work in Iraq. Each CACI specialist is costing the U.S. taxpayer $421,585 per year.

On May 3, Titan reported a 21 percent growth in its first quarter revenues of $459 million. “Titan's linguist contract with the U.S. Army” was noted as a “primary driver” behind the companies increased revenues. The only language tool Titan offers on its website is for “Levantine Arabic,” i.e. the Arabic spoken in Palestine, Lebanon, and Syria.

Last July, however, Titan Systems Corporation of Fairfax, Va., placed an ad for “native Arabic, Aramaic, Kurdish, Persian, Pashto, Turkish and Dari speakers.” Titan’s ad for interpreters required the native speakers be U.S. citizens and fluent in English. It is extremely unlikely that any native speaker of Arabic would be named “John Israel.”

Still on the Job

Taguba’s report called for Stephanowicz to be terminated and reprimanded, but on April 25 he was still on the job at Abu Ghraib hitting golfballs from the roof onto the highway in his free time, according to the “Iraq Diary” of one of his co-workers. Until recently, Joe Ryan, one of the interrogators, had his revealing journal about his work at Abu Ghraib posted on the website of KSTP, a St. Paul, Minnesota radio station. According to KSTP’s Ron Rosenbaum, the journal was removed at Ryan’s request when the photos of abuse surfaced.

As of May 5, however, two months after Taguba had called for Stephanowicz to be fired, CACI, Stephanowicz’s employer, said they had “received no information from the Dept. of Defense” on the matter.

Phenomenal Damage

"Everybody understands the phenomenal damage this accusation has caused in that part of the world," Sen. Joseph Biden of Delaware, the senior Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, said. "This is the single most significant undermining act that's occurred in a decade in that region of the world, in terms of our standing."

The abuse at Abu Ghraib resembles Israeli methods applied in the occupied territories. “Israel is the only country in which the kind of abuse documented at Abu Ghraib occurs as a matter of policy,” Hussein Ibish, spokesman for the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), the largest Arab-American organization, told American Free Press.

Palestinian news sources are replete with similar accounts of Israeli soldiers forcing Palestinians to strip and perform degrading sexual acts. Reports of Palestinian prisoners having been sodomized during torture sessions with Israeli military interrogators are common.

Washington Report on Middle East Affairs has articles on such abuse going back to 1996. Israeli soldiers paraded naked Palestinians through the streets of Jerusalem after the massacre of Deir Yassin in April 1948. Dr. Hazem Nusseibeh of Palestine Broadcasting witnessed the massacre and its aftermath. Nusseibeh said women were bayoneted and about 11 children were made to parade naked through the streets of Jerusalem.

Palestine Chronicle, an online news source, carried an article in November 2002 titled “Stripping Palestinians has Become Common Practice.”

The article described an incident in which Israeli soldiers ordered a young resident of the town of Nablus to strip completely naked in the street and act like a dog.

Deliberate Intelligence Tactic

“It was a deliberate intelligence tactic,” Ibish said when asked if he thought the photos could be part of an Israeli intelligence plot to damage U.S. relations in the Arab world. “[Ariel] Sharon plays a zero-sum game,” he said. “He thinks the worst possible relations between United States and the people of the Arab and Muslim world is good for Israel.”

American Free Press asked the coalition press desk in Baghdad if Israeli advisors worked with the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq or at the Abu Ghraib prison. “No to both,” was the response from Major Carolyn Dysart.

Rafael Barak, spokesman at the Israeli embassy in Washington, said he was “not aware” of any Israeli presence in Iraq.

The accused military personnel may face courts martial, but the civilian contractors can be charged with war crimes through the War Crimes Act of 1996 and the Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act of 2000, according to Francis A. Boyle, author and professor of international law at the University of Illinois.

War crimes cases against U.S. civilians working with the military in Iraq would be prosecuted by the Dept. of Justice, Boyle said.

“The question is how high this goes,” he added. “[Lieut. General Ricardo S.] Sanchez is letting the superiors off the hook.” Boyle’s latest book on Iraq is entitled Destroying World Order: U.S. Imperialism in the Middle East Before and After September 11th.

"Tell him to walk and bark like a dog." That's right, good. O.K., I've got the picture."

Question: Where have we seen this before?
Answer: ISRAELI OCCUPIED PALESTINE
http://www.rumormillnews.com/cgi-bin/forum.cgi?read=48426

Also see:
Who is John Israel? Why was he Running the Show?
http://www.thetruthseeker.co.uk/article.asp?id=1788

Alpha

TORTURE INTERCONNECTIONS - The U.S. and Israel

http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/middle-east-and-asia/2004/05/06/torture-interconnections-the-u-s-and-israel.php

Alpha · Posted: Sun May 09, 2004 4:50 pm Post subject: Digital damage to moral image

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/172436_fisk09.html

Sunday, May 9, 2004

Digital damage to moral image

ROBERT FISK
BRITISH COLUMNIST

First, our enemies created the suicide bomber. Now we have our own digital suicide bomber, the camera. Just look at the way Lynndie holds the leash of the naked, bearded Iraqi. Take a close look at the leather strap, the pain on the prisoner's face. No sadistic movie could outdo the damage of this image. In 2001, the planes smashed into the buildings; today, Lynndie smashes to pieces our entire morality with just one tug on the leash.

The Muslim suicide bomber cries Allahu Akbar , God is greater. And what does Lynndie England's partner in crime do? Why, his home garden is plastered with a legend from the Book of Hosea, about sowing and righteousness and plowing. Could ever Islam have come so intimately into contact with the sexuality of the Old Testament? Could neo-conservative Christianity -- Lynndie is also a church goer -- have collided so violently, so revoltingly, so obscenely with Islam? And who were the innocent in these vile photographs? The American torturers and humiliators? Or the Iraqi victims?

President Bush is fearful of Arab reaction to these pictures. Why? For a year now, Iraqis have been trying to tell journalists of the brutal treatment they are receiving at the hands of their occupiers. They don't need these incriminating photographs to prove to them what they already know to be true. But in the history of the Middle East, these pictures already have the status of those most damaging snapshots of the Vietnam War: the police chief in Saigon executing his Vietcong prisoner, the naked girl burned by Nepalm, the pile of bodies My Lai. For Arabs read Deir Yassin and the corpses piled in the Palestinian refugee camp of Sabra and Chatila in 1982.

Not long after the occupation of Baghdad by U.S. troops in April of last year, we got our hands on videotape of the brutal whipping of Iraqi prisoners by Saddam's security police. I'm not sure which circle of hell the victims were enduring in the 45 minutes of sadism, which I still have on one tape. They are whipped, sticks are broken in their throats, they are kicked into sewers and they cower like dogs. And why were these war crimes filmed? I thought at first that it was intended for the enjoyment of Saddam or his disgusting son Oudai. But now I realize that the videos were taken so that the prisoners could be humiliated. Their suffering, their pathetic pleas for mercy, their animal-like behavior was to be recorded -- to add the final layer of degradation to their fate.

And now I realize, too, that the pictures of the Iraqis so cruelly treated -- so tortured -- by the Americans, were taken for precisely the same reason. Someone decided that the photos would be the final straw, the breaking point, the moment of capitulation for these young men. Make them simulate oral sex. Make them look at the penis of their best friend. Get a girl to admire their attempted erection. This was truly Saddamite in its perversity.

So let's, as the Americans say, get real. Who taught Lynndie and her boyfriend and the other American sadists of Abu Ghraib prison to do this? I used to ask who taught the Syrian and Iraqi secret police to do this. The answer to the latter question was simple: the East German secret police.

But the answer to the first question? Well, we have been told that there were "contracted" interrogators at Abu Ghraib. I have reason to believe that Gen. Janis Karpinski, the luckless prison commander who is going to be dumped out of the Army for interrogations over which she had no control, knew that "outsiders" were questioning her inmates. She was never allowed into the interrogation room. And I can see why. So, no doubt, can she.

So who were these mysterious "interrogators"? If they were not CIA or FBI staff, who were they? Several names are already going the rounds -- so far, journalists claim they have no final proof of them -- and a number, so I understand, hold more than one passport. Why were they brought into Abu Ghraib? Who brought them in? How much are they paid? And who trained them ? Who taught them that it was a good idea to get a girl to point at an Arab who was being forced to masturbate, to humiliate an Iraqi into submission by hooding him with a girl's lingerie?

We are not just talking sick here. We're talking professionals. Lynndie and her boyfriend were not part of a "rogue" unit. They were told to do these despicable things. They were encouraged to do it. This was an order from someone else. Who? When can we see their pictures, their identity, their passports, their orders?

Yes, it's part of a culture, a long tradition that goes back to the Crusades; that the Muslim is dirty, lascivious, un-Christian, unworthy of humanity -- which is pretty much what Osama bin Laden (now forgotten by Bush, I notice) believes about us Westerners. And our illegal, immoral, meretricious war has now brought forth the images that betray our racism.

The hooded man with the wires attached to his hands has now become an iconic portrait every bit as memorable as the picture of the second aircraft flying into the World Trade Center. No, of course, we haven't killed 3,000 Iraqis. We've killed many more. And the same goes for Afghanistan.
Robert Fisk writes for The Independent in Great Britain.

Alpha

http://www.time.com/time/columnist/klein/article/0,9565,634641,00.html

PSCM USCGR

Alpha

Alpha · Posted: Sun May 09, 2004 10:51 pm Post subject: CHAIN OF COMMAND

Here is the uncensored version of General Taguba's report:

http://www.antiwar.com/news/?articleid=2479

Here is the latest article by Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker:

http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?040517fa_fact2

CHAIN OF COMMAND

by SEYMOUR M. HERSH
How the Department of Defense mishandled the disaster at Abu Ghraib.
Issue of 2004-05-17
Posted 2004-05-09

In his devastating report on conditions at Abu Ghraib prison, in Iraq, Major General Antonio M. Taguba singled out only three military men for praise. One of them, Master-at-Arms William J. Kimbro, a Navy dog handler, should be commended, Taguba wrote, because he “knew his duties and refused to participate in improper interrogations despite significant pressure from the MI”—military intelligence—“personnel at Abu Ghraib.” Elsewhere in the report it became clear what Kimbro would not do: American soldiers, Taguba said, used “military working dogs to frighten and intimidate detainees with threats of attack, and in one instance actually biting a detainee.”

Taguba’s report was triggered by a soldier’s decision to give Army investigators photographs of the sexual humiliation and abuse of prisoners. These images were first broadcast on “60 Minutes II” on April 28th. Seven enlisted members of the 372nd Military Police Company of the 320th Military Police Battalion, an Army reserve unit, are now facing prosecution, and six officers have been reprimanded. Last week, I was given another set of digital photographs, which had been in the possession of a member of the 320th. According to a time sequence embedded in the digital files, the photographs were taken by two different cameras over a twelve-minute period on the evening of December 12, 2003, two months after the military-police unit was assigned to Abu Ghraib.

An Iraqi prisoner and American military dog handlers. Other photographs show the Iraqi on the ground, bleeding.

One of the new photographs shows a young soldier, wearing a dark jacket over his uniform and smiling into the camera, in the corridor of the jail. In the background are two Army dog handlers, in full camouflage combat gear, restraining two German shepherds. The dogs are barking at a man who is partly obscured from the camera’s view by the smiling soldier. Another image shows that the man, an Iraqi prisoner, is naked. His hands are clasped behind his neck and he is leaning against the door to a cell, contorted with terror, as the dogs bark a few feet away. Other photographs show the dogs straining at their leashes and snarling at the prisoner. In another, taken a few minutes later, the Iraqi is lying on the ground, writhing in pain, with a soldier sitting on top of him, knee pressed to his back. Blood is streaming from the inmate’s leg. Another photograph is a closeup of the naked prisoner, from his waist to his ankles, lying on the floor. On his right thigh is what appears to be a bite or a deep scratch. There is another, larger wound on his left leg, covered in blood.

There is at least one other report of violence involving American soldiers, an Army dog, and Iraqi citizens, but it was not in Abu Ghraib. Cliff Kindy, a member of the Christian Peacemaker Teams, a church-supported group that has been monitoring the situation in Iraq, told me that last November G.I.s unleashed a military dog on a group of civilians during a sweep in Ramadi, about thirty miles west of Fallujah. At first, Kindy told me, “the soldiers went house to house, and arrested thirty people.” (One of them was Saad al-Khashab, an attorney with the Organization for Human Rights in Iraq, who told Kindy about the incident.) While the thirty detainees were being handcuffed and laid on the ground, a firefight broke out nearby; when it ended, the Iraqis were shoved into a house. Khashab told Kindy that the American soldiers then “turned the dog loose inside the house, and several people were bitten.” (The Defense Department said that it was unable to comment about the incident before The New Yorker went to press.)

When I asked retired Major General Charles Hines, who was commandant of the Army’s military-police school during a twenty-eight-year career in military law enforcement, about these reports, he reacted with dismay. “Turning a dog loose in a room of people? Loosing dogs on prisoners of war? I’ve never heard of it, and it would never have been tolerated,” Hines said. He added that trained police dogs have long been a presence in Army prisons, where they are used for sniffing out narcotics and other contraband among the prisoners, and, occasionally, for riot control. But, he said, “I would never have authorized it for interrogating or coercing prisoners. If I had, I’d have been put in jail or kicked out of the Army.”

The International Red Cross and human-rights groups have repeatedly complained during the past year about the American military’s treatment of Iraqi prisoners, with little success. In one case, disclosed last month by the Denver Post, three Army soldiers from a military-intelligence battalion were accused of assaulting a female Iraqi inmate at Abu Ghraib. After an administrative review, the three were fined “at least five hundred dollars and demoted in rank,” the newspaper said.

Army commanders had a different response when, on January 13th, a military policeman presented Army investigators with a computer disk containing graphic photographs. The images were being swapped from computer to computer throughout the 320th Battalion. The Army’s senior commanders immediately understood they had a problem—a looming political and public-relations disaster that would taint America and damage the war effort.

One of the first soldiers to be questioned was Ivan Frederick, the M.P. sergeant who was in charge of a night shift at Abu Ghraib. Frederick, who has been ordered to face a court-martial in Iraq for his role in the abuse, kept a running diary that began with a knock on his door by agents of the Army’s Criminal Investigations Division (C.I.D.) at two-thirty in the morning on January 14th. “I was escorted . . . to the front door of our building, out of sight from my room,” Frederick wrote, “while . . . two unidentified males stayed in my room. ‘Are they searching my room?’” He was told yes. Frederick later formally agreed to permit the agents to search for cameras, computers, and storage devices.

On January 16th, three days after the Army received the pictures, Central Command issued a blandly worded, five-sentence press release about an investigation into the mistreatment of prisoners. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said last week that it was then that he learned of the allegations. At some point soon afterward, Rumsfeld informed President Bush. On January 19th, Lieutenant General Ricardo S. Sanchez, the officer in charge of American forces in Iraq, ordered a secret investigation into Abu Ghraib. Two weeks later, General Taguba was ordered to conduct his inquiry. He submitted his report on February 26th. By then, according to testimony before the Senate last week by General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, people “inside our building” had discussed the photographs. Myers, by his own account, had still not read the Taguba report or seen the photographs, yet he knew enough about the abuses to persuade “60 Minutes II” to delay its story.

At a Pentagon news conference last week, Rumsfeld and Marine General Peter Pace, the Vice-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, insisted that the investigation into Abu Ghraib had moved routinely through the chain of command. If the Army had been slow, it was because of built-in safeguards. Pace told the journalists, “It’s important to know that as investigations are completed they come up the chain of command in a very systematic way. So that the individual who reports in writing [sends it] up to the next level commander. But he or she takes time, a week or two weeks, three weeks, whatever it takes, to read all of the documentation, get legal advice [and] make the decisions that are appropriate at his or her level. . . . That way everyone’s rights are protected and we have the opportunity systematically to take a look at the entire process.”

In interviews, however, retired and active-duty officers and Pentagon officials said that the system had not worked. Knowledge of the nature of the abuses—and especially the politically toxic photographs—had been severely, and unusually, restricted. “Everybody I’ve talked to said, ‘We just didn’t know’—not even in the J.C.S.,” one well-informed former intelligence official told me, emphasizing that he was referring to senior officials with whom such allegations would normally be shared. “I haven’t talked to anybody on the inside who knew—nowhere. It’s got them scratching their heads.” A senior Pentagon official said that many of the senior generals in the Army were similarly out of the loop on the Abu Ghraib allegations.

Within the Pentagon, there was a spate of fingerpointing last week. One top general complained to a colleague that the commanders in Iraq should have taken C4, a powerful explosive, and blown up Abu Ghraib last spring, with all of its “emotional baggage”—the prison was known for its brutality under Saddam Hussein—instead of turning it into an American facility. “This is beyond the pale in terms of lack of command attention,” a retired major general told me, speaking of the abuses at Abu Ghraib. “Where were the flag officers? And I’m not just talking about a one-star,” he added, referring to Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, the commander at Abu Ghraib who was relieved of duty. “This was a huge leadership failure.”

The Pentagon official told me that many senior generals believe that, along with the civilians in Rumsfeld’s office, General Sanchez and General John Abizaid, who is in charge of the Central Command, in Tampa, Florida, had done their best to keep the issue quiet in the first months of the year. The official chain of command flows from General Sanchez, in Iraq, to Abizaid, and on to Rumsfeld and President Bush. “You’ve got to match action, or nonaction, with interests,” the Pentagon official said. “What is the motive for not being forthcoming? They foresaw major diplomatic problems.”

Secrecy and wishful thinking, the Pentagon official said, are defining characteristics of Rumsfeld’s Pentagon, and shaped its response to the reports from Abu Ghraib. “They always want to delay the release of bad news—in the hope that something good will break,” he said. The habit of procrastination in the face of bad news led to disconnects between Rumsfeld and the Army staff officers who were assigned to planning for troop requirements in Iraq. A year ago, the Pentagon official told me, when it became clear that the Army would have to call up more reserve units to deal with the insurgency, “we had call-up orders that languished for thirty or forty days in the office of the Secretary of Defense.” Rumsfeld’s staff always seemed to be waiting for something to turn up—for the problem to take care of itself, without any additional troops. The official explained, “They were hoping that they wouldn’t have to make a decision.” The delay meant that soldiers in some units about to be deployed had only a few days to prepare wills and deal with other family and financial issues.

The same deliberate indifference to bad news was evident in the past year, the Pentagon official said, when the Army conducted a series of elaborate war games. Planners would present best-case, moderate-case, and worst-case scenarios, in an effort to assess where the Iraq war was headed and to estimate future troop needs. In every case, the number of troops actually required exceeded the worst-case analysis. Nevertheless, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and civilian officials in the Pentagon continued to insist that future planning be based on the most optimistic scenario. “The optimistic estimate was that at this point in time”—mid-2004—“the U.S. Army would need only a handful of combat brigades in Iraq,” the Pentagon official said. “There are nearly twenty now, with the international coalition drying up. They were wildly off the mark.” The official added, “From the beginning, the Army community was saying that the projections and estimates were unrealistic.” Now, he said, “we’re struggling to maintain a hundred and thirty-five thousand troops while allowing soldiers enough time back home.”

In his news conference last Tuesday, Rumsfeld, when asked whether he thought the photographs and stories from Abu Ghraib were a setback for American policy in Iraq, still seemed to be in denial. “Oh, I’m not one for instant history,” he responded. By Friday, however, with some members of Congress and with editorials calling for his resignation, Rumsfeld testified at length before House and Senate committees and apologized for what he said was “fundamentally un-American” wrongdoing at Abu Ghraib. He also warned that more, and even uglier, disclosures were to come. Rumsfeld said that he had not actually looked at any of the Abu Ghraib photographs until some of them appeared in press accounts, and hadn’t reviewed the Army’s copies until the day before. When he did, they were “hard to believe,” he said. “There are other photos that depict . . . acts that can only be described as blatantly sadistic, cruel, and inhuman.” Later, he said, “It’s going to get still more terrible, I’m afraid.” Rumsfeld added, “I failed to recognize how important it was.”

NBC News later quoted U.S. military officials as saying that the unreleased photographs showed American soldiers “severely beating an Iraqi prisoner nearly to death, having sex with a female Iraqi prisoner, and ‘acting inappropriately with a dead body.’ The officials said there also was a videotape, apparently shot by U.S. personnel, showing Iraqi guards raping young boys.”

No amount of apologetic testimony or political spin last week could mask the fact that, since the attacks of September 11th, President Bush and his top aides have seen themselves as engaged in a war against terrorism in which the old rules did not apply. In the privacy of his office, Rumsfeld chafed over what he saw as the reluctance of senior Pentagon generals and admirals to act aggressively. By mid-2002, he and his senior aides were exchanging secret memorandums on modifying the culture of the military leaders and finding ways to encourage them “to take greater risks.” One memo spoke derisively of the generals in the Pentagon, and said, “Our prerequisite of perfection for ‘actionable intelligence’ has paralyzed us. We must accept that we may have to take action before every question can be answered.” The Defense Secretary was told that he should “break the ‘belt-and-suspenders’ mindset within today’s military . . . we ‘over-plan’ for every contingency. . . . We must be willing to accept the risks.” With operations involving the death of foreign enemies, the memo went on, the planning should not be carried out in the Pentagon: “The result will be decision by committee.”

The Pentagon’s impatience with military protocol extended to questions about the treatment of prisoners caught in the course of its military operations. Soon after 9/11, as the war on terror got under way, Donald Rumsfeld repeatedly made public his disdain for the Geneva conventions. Complaints about America’s treatment of prisoners, Rumsfeld said in early 2002, amounted to “isolated pockets of international hyperventilation.”

The effort to determine what happened at Abu Ghraib has evolved into a sprawling set of related investigations, some of them hastily put together, including inquiries into twenty-five suspicious deaths. Investigators have become increasingly concerned with the role played not only by military and intelligence officials but also by C.I.A. agents and private-contract employees. In a statement, the C.I.A. acknowledged that its Inspector General had an investigation under way into abuses at Abu Ghraib, which extended to the death of a prisoner. A source familiar with one of the investigations told me that the victim was the man whose photograph, which shows his battered body packed in ice, has circulated around the world. A Justice Department prosecutor has been assigned to the case. The source also told me that an Army intelligence operative and a judge advocate general were seeking, through their lawyers, to negotiate immunity from prosecution in return for testimony.

The relationship between military policing and intelligence forces inside the Army prison system reached a turning point last fall in response to the insurgency against the Coalition Provisional Authority. “This is a fight for intelligence,” Brigadier General Martin Dempsey, commander of the 1st Armored Division, told a reporter at a Baghdad press briefing in November. “Do I have enough soldiers? The answer is absolutely yes. The larger issue is, how do I use them and on what basis? And the answer to that is intelligence . . . to try to figure out how to take all this human intelligence as it comes in to us [and] turn it into something that’s actionable.” The Army prison system would now be asked to play its part.

Two months earlier, Major General Geoffrey Miller, the commander of the task force in charge of the prison at Guantánamo, had brought a team of experts to Iraq to review the Army program. His recommendation was radical: that Army prisons be geared, first and foremost, to interrogations and the gathering of information needed for the war effort. “Detention operations must act as an enabler for interrogation . . . to provide a safe, secure and humane environment that supports the expeditious collection of intelligence,” Miller wrote. The military police on guard duty at the prisons should make support of military intelligence a priority.

General Sanchez agreed, and on November 19th his headquarters issued an order formally giving the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade tactical control over the prison. General Taguba fearlessly took issue with the Sanchez orders, which, he wrote in his report, “effectively made an MI Officer, rather than an MP officer, responsible for the MP units conducting detainee operations at that facility. This is not doctrinally sound due to the different missions and agenda assigned to each of these respective specialties.”

Taguba also criticized Miller’s report, noting that “the intelligence value of detainees held at . . . Guantánamo is different than that of the detainees/internees held at Abu Ghraib and other detention facilities in Iraq. . . . There are a large number of Iraqi criminals held at Abu Ghraib. These are not believed to be international terrorists or members of Al Qaeda.” Taguba noted that Miller’s recommendations “appear to be in conflict” with other studies and with Army regulations that call for military-police units to have control of the prison system. By placing military-intelligence operatives in control instead, Miller’s recommendations and Sanchez’s change in policy undoubtedly played a role in the abuses at Abu Ghraib. General Taguba concluded that certain military-intelligence officers and civilian contractors at Abu Ghraib were “either directly or indirectly responsible” for the abuses, and urged that they be subjected to disciplinary action.

In late March, before the Abu Ghraib scandal became publicly known, Geoffrey Miller was transferred from Guantánamo and named head of prison operations in Iraq. “We have changed this—trust us,” Miller told reporters in early May. “There were errors made. We have corrected those. We will make sure that they do not happen again.”

Military-intelligence personnel assigned to Abu Ghraib repeatedly wore “sterile,” or unmarked, uniforms or civilian clothes while on duty. “You couldn’t tell them apart,” the source familiar with the investigation said. The blurring of identities and organizations meant that it was impossible for the prisoners, or, significantly, the military policemen on duty, to know who was doing what to whom, and who had the authority to give orders. Civilian employees at the prison were not bound by the Uniform Code of Military Justice, but they were bound by civilian law—though it is unclear whether American or Iraqi law would apply.

One of the employees involved in the interrogations at Abu Ghraib, according to the Taguba report, was Steven Stefanowicz, a civilian working for CACI International, a Virginia-based company. Private companies like CACI and Titan Corp. could pay salaries of well over a hundred thousand dollars for the dangerous work in Iraq, far more than the Army pays, and were permitted, as never before in U.S. military history, to handle sensitive jobs. (In a briefing last week, General Miller confirmed that Stefanowicz had been reassigned to administrative duties. A CACI spokeswoman declined to comment on any employee in Iraq, citing safety concerns, but said that the company still had not heard anything directly from the government about Stefanowicz.)

Stefanowicz and his colleagues conducted most, if not all, of their interrogations in the Abu Ghraib facilities known to the soldiers as the Wood Building and the Steel Building. The interrogation centers were rarely visited by the M.P.s, a source familiar with the investigation said. The most important prisoners—the suspected insurgency members deemed to be High Value Detainees—were housed at Camp Cropper, near the Baghdad airport, but the pressure on soldiers to accede to requests from military intelligence was felt throughout the system.

Not everybody went along. A company captain in a military-police unit in Baghdad told me last week that he was approached by a junior intelligence officer who requested that his M.P.s keep a group of detainees awake around the clock until they began talking. “I said, ‘No, we will not do that,’” the captain said. “The M.I. commander comes to me and says, ‘What is the problem? We’re stressed, and all we are asking you to do is to keep them awake.’ I ask, ‘How? You’ve received training on that, but my soldiers don’t know how to do it. And when you ask an eighteen-year-old kid to keep someone awake, and he doesn’t know how to do it, he’s going to get creative.’” The M.I. officer took the request to the captain’s commander, but, the captain said, “he backed me up.

“It’s all about people. The M.P.s at Abu Ghraib were failed by their commanders—both low-ranking and high,” the captain said. “The system is broken—no doubt about it. But the Army is made up of people, and we’ve got to depend on them to do the right thing.”

In his report, Taguba strongly suggested that there was a link between the interrogation process in Afghanistan and the abuses at Abu Ghraib. A few months after General Miller’s report, Taguba wrote, General Sanchez, apparently troubled by reports of wrongdoing in Army jails in Iraq, asked Army Provost Marshal Donald Ryder, a major general, to carry out a study of military prisons. In the resulting study, which is still classified, Ryder identified a conflict between military policing and military intelligence dating back to the Afghan war. He wrote, “Recent intelligence collection in support of Operation Enduring Freedom posited a template whereby military police actively set favorable conditions for subsequent interviews.”

One of the most prominent prisoners of the Afghan war was John Walker Lindh, the twenty-one-year-old Californian who was captured in December, 2001. Lindh was accused of training with Al Qaeda terrorists and conspiring to kill Americans. A few days after his arrest, according to a federal-court affidavit filed by his attorney, James Brosnahan, a group of armed American soldiers “blindfolded Mr. Lindh, and took several pictures of Mr. Lindh and themselves with Mr. Lindh. In one, the soldiers scrawled ‘shithead’ across Mr. Lindh’s blindfold and posed with him. . . . Another told Mr. Lindh that he was ‘going to hang’ for his actions and that after he was dead, the soldiers would sell the photographs and give the money to a Christian organization.” Some of the photographs later made their way to the American media. Lindh was later stripped naked, bound to a stretcher with duct tape, and placed in a windowless shipping container. Once again, the affidavit said, “military personnel photographed Mr. Lindh as he lay on the stretcher.” On July 15, 2002, Lindh agreed to plead guilty to carrying a gun while serving in the Taliban and received a twenty-year jail term. During that process, Brosnahan told me, “the Department of Defense insisted that we state that there was ‘no deliberate’ mistreatment of John.” His client agreed to do so, but, the attorney noted, “Against that, you have that photograph of a naked John on that stretcher.”

The photographing of prisoners, both in Afghanistan and in Iraq, seems to have been not random but, rather, part of the dehumanizing interrogation process. The Times published an interview last week with Hayder Sabbar Abd, who claimed, convincingly, to be one of the mistreated Iraqi prisoners in the Abu Ghraib photographs. Abd told Ian Fisher, the Times reporter, that his ordeal had been recorded, almost constantly, by cameras, which added to his humiliation. He remembered how the camera flashed repeatedly as soldiers told to him to masturbate and beat him when he refused.

One lingering mystery is how Ryder could have conducted his review last fall, in the midst of the prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib, without managing to catch it. (Ryder told a Pentagon press briefing last week that his trip to Iraq “was not an inspection or an investigation. . . . It was an assessment.”) In his report to Sanchez, Ryder flatly declared that “there were no military police units purposely applying inappropriate confinement practices.” Willie J. Rowell, who served for thirty-six years as an agent of the C.I.D., told me that Ryder was in a bureaucratic bind. The Army had revised its command structure last fall, and Ryder, as provost marshal, was now the commanding general of all military-police units as well as of the C.I.D. He was, in essence, being asked to investigate himself. “What Ryder should have done was set up a C.I.D. task force headed by an 0-6”—full colonel—“with fifteen agents, and begin interviewing everybody and taking sworn statements,” Rowell said. “He had to answer questions about the prisons in September, when Sanchez asked for an assessment.” At the time, Rowell added, the Army prison system was unprepared for the demands the insurgency placed on it. “Ryder was a man in a no-win situation,” Rowell said. “As provost marshal, if he’d turned a C.I.D. task force loose, he could be in harm’s way—because he’s also boss of the military police. He was being eaten alive.”

Ryder may have protected himself, but Taguba did not. “He’s not regarded as a hero in some circles in the Pentagon,” a retired Army major general said of Taguba. “He’s the guy who blew the whistle, and the Army will pay the price for his integrity. The leadership does not like to have people make bad news public.”

dangerousdna · Posted: Sun May 09, 2004 11:09 pm Post subject:

Sunday 9th May 2004 :
Questions that demand answers, Perjury before Congress ?

I am a former Military Intelligence Analyst/Interrogator of 15 years service.

I would ask you to carefully consider my observations and analysis re what I see as overlooked but significant aspects related to the Taguba Report and the testimony before Congress:

1. Excerpt from MG Taguba's report. In one of the two previous reports used by M G Taguba as references for his, the third sequential, investigation (Italics are my emphasis):

"With respect to interrogation, MG Miller's Team recommended that CJTF-7 dedicate and train a detention guard force subordinate to the Joint Interrogation Debriefing Center (JIDC) Commander that "sets the conditions for the successful interrogation and exploitation of internees/detainees."

Regarding Detention Operations, MG Miller's team stated that the function of Detention Operations is to provide a safe, secure, and humane environment that supports the expeditious collection of intelligence. However, it also stated "it is essential that the guard force be actively engaged in setting the conditions for successful exploitation of the internees."

Comment: Maj General Miller was previously responsible for the management of detention and interrogation/intelligence collection at Guanatanamo Bay, Cuba (Gitmo). He has subsequently been appointed to manage all detention operations in Iraq after the removal of M G Karpinski. Please note, M G Miller and a team of 30-odd 'specialists' visited Abu Ghrieb in August/September 2003 with the specific aim of improving "interrogation/intelligence collection and set the conditions for the successful interrogation and exploitation of internees/detainees", based on 'lessons learned' through management and techniques he and staff developed at Gitmo, since 9/11. Remarkably, M G Miller is now conducting restricted tours for the media and promising improved conditions at Abu Gharieb. I suggest the subsequent events re the photographs and torture that took place from Nov '03 thru to Jan '04 are likely a 'direct' causual consequence of his and his teams 'sanctioned by Command' efforts. M G Miller can in no way be regarded as someone without 'blood' on his hands. Considering the testimony given to congress on friday and the extensive mendacious and disingenuous assurances of M G Miller re Abu Gharieb and nterrogation/intelligence-gathering, when will the impeachment proceedings commence ?.

2. Excerpt from MG Taguba's report, (Italics are my emphasis):

"In general, U.S. civilian contract personnel (Titan Corporation, CACI, etc….), third-country nationals and local contractors do not appear to be properly supervised within the detention facility at Abu Ghraib..."

My Comment: 'Third-country nationals' is an intelligence community euphemism for nationals from a 'politically sensitive' country. The phrase is used to mask 'National Security'/Classified operations in conjunction with other nations Military, security, Intelligence communities, i.e. CIA, Shin Bet, MI6, etc. Note contracted US interrogators/translators, local (Iraqi, ex Iraqi Mukhabarrat (de-ba'athified ?) interrogators/translators are commented on collectively with 'third country nationals'. Therefore the clear implication is the probability of interrogators/translators from Israel ?, UK ?, etc directly participating in or offering training expertise re interrogators/translation/analysis throughout Abu Gharieb, possibly Iraq, Afghanistan, Gitmo with the full sanctioned knowledge of US Intelligence community & military command.

Follow this link for a reference to one of the identified interrogators (Joe Ryan, and a portion of his online diary whilst an intterogator at Abu Gharieb) employed in wing 1A as having indentified in his resume having attended Israeli Interrogation Course. http://billmon.org/archives/001450.html#comments. Further comments/analysis re the specifics of Joe Ryans diary to follow.

3. Excerpts from MG Taguba's report, (Capitalisation my emphasis):

"The various detention facilities operated by the 800th MP Brigade have routinely held persons brought to them by other government agencies (OGAs) WITHOUT ACCOUNTING FOR THEM, KNOWING their identities, or even THE REASON for their detention. The Joint Interrogation and Debriefing Center at Abu Ghraib called these detainees "GHOST DETAINEES". ON AT LEAST ONE OCCASION, the 320th MP Battalion at Abu Ghraib held a handful of "ghost detainees" (6-8) for OGAs that they moved around within the facility to HIDE THEM from a visiting International Committee of the Red Cross survey team. This maneuver was DECEPTIVE, contrary to Army Doctrine and in VIOLATION OF INTERNATIONAL LAW…."(Findings and Recommendations, Part II, No. 33)

My Comment: As previously discussed, other government agencies (OGAs) is a routine Intelligence euphemism for non-military intelligence agencies such as CIA, FBI, NSA, etc. In the US Military/Intelligence context it almost always means CIA. Ghost Detainees are those that are not documented, processed or recorded in any way in order to systematically deny them Legal, Human and International Law and Genevea Convention rights protections. It is a practice that came to prominence throughout Latin America, Sudan, 1960's Algiers, etc. Such activities clearly indicate a known, sanctioned, systemic Military/Intelligence/Government Agency command sanctioned policy of creating 'Disappeared', ultimately resulting in extreme forms of unnaccountable torture and ultimaley 'disposal' (i.e. murder, via Argentinian Deathsquads, circa Vietnam 'Phoenix' operations in Vietnam/Laos, etc). Therefore it is highly probable this activity also occurs throughout any other area of operations of the US/UK etc in the so called 'war on terror', ie. the Globe. This is outrageous !

There's no way in the world the practice of keeping "ghost detainees" in secret confinement - in flagrant violation of the Geneva Convention - can be written off as a 'non-systemic' 'isolated abuse.' This is like something out of Kiss of the Spider Woman, or journalist Jacobo Timerman's account of his time in a secret Argentine political prison, Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0299182444/103-3183057-6828619?v=glance. Is this what CIA counterterrorism chief Cofer Black meant when he said http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/2002_hr/092602black.html that after 9/11, "the gloves came off?" And did the humanity come off with them ?

Follow this link for relevant references: http://billmon.org/archives/001455.html#comments. Please note the Amnesty International reference to suspicion of similar activities occurring at the High Value Detainee (HVD) section of detention facilities at the US Bagram Airforce Base in Afghanistan.

4. An example of the extreme torture and subsequent death (murder ?) during interrogation, and 'disposal' of a 'ghost detainee' by the CIA at Abu Ghrieb. Yet another 'disappeared' (you may have seen the Photo of the obviously 'beaten to death' detainee packed in ice on a guerney ):

Frederick's version http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?040510fa_fact of a relevant incident is a good deal more, ah, colorful: In November, Frederick wrote, an Iraqi prisoner under the control of what the Abu Ghraib guards called "O.G.A.," or other government agencies-that is, the C.I.A. and its paramilitary employees-was brought to his unit for questioning. "They stressed him out so bad that the man passed away. They put his body in a body bag and packed him in ice for approximately twenty-four hours in the shower. . . . The next day the medics came and put his body on a stretcher, placed a fake IV in his arm and took him away." The dead Iraqi was never entered into the prison's inmate-control system, Frederick recounted, "and therefore never had a number."

Comment: as above for para 4. This is the end result re 'ghost detainees', undocumented, unaccountable torture, death and dissapearance.

5. Why is the Taguba report classified Secret/NOFORN (no Foriegn governement dissemination) when it is a formal US Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) investigation ?:

TORTURE REPORT MAY HAVE BROKEN CLASSIFICATION RULES http://www.fas.org/sgp/news/secrecy/2004/05/050504.html Posted May 5, 2004 09:33 PM PST By classifying an explosive report on the torture of Iraqi prisoners as "Secret," the Pentagon may have violated official secrecy policies, which prohibit the use of classification to conceal illegal activities.

My Comment: I suggest it had been classified SECRET/NOFORN because of the oblique, passing references that clearly indicate sanctioned, systemic, patently criminal, multi-theatre practices since at least 9/11 discussed above in para 2 & 3.

6. Key private contractor interrogator clearly identified in M G Taguba's report was still doing his worst as an interrogator at Abu Gharieb at least thru 26 April '04:

That Mr. Steven Stephanowicz, Contract US Civilian Interrogator, CACI, 205th Military Intelligence Brigade, be given an Official Reprimand to be placed in his employment file, termination of employment, and generation of a derogatory report to revoke his security clearance for the following acts which have been previously referred to in the aforementioned findings: • Made a false statement to the investigation team regarding the locations of his interrogations, the activities during his interrogations, and his knowledge of abuses.

• Allowed and/or instructed MPs, who were not trained in interrogation techniques, to facilitate interrogations by "setting conditions" which were neither authorized and in accordance with applicable regulations/policy. He clearly knew his instructions equated to physical abuse.

The following is an excerpt from Joe Ryans (another Private contractor interrogator) Online diary of his experiences at Abu Gharieb thru to 25 April, when the military 'requested' him to 'pull' his 'online diary' (my emphasis):

I got to take the rest of the day off after our long booth time. This gave us a nice evening after dinner to head to the roof and play a round of golf. Scott Norman, Jeff Mouton, Steve Hattabaugh, Steve Stefanowicz, and I all took turns trying to hit balls over the back wall and onto the highway. Since the club is a left handed 3 iron, I had an unfair advantage and missed a dump truck by only about ten feet. Not bad since the highway is about 220 yards. We do what we can to make it fun here.

Online diary Cache here: http://216.239.41.104/search?q=cache:XYYOCOWnu_8J:www.am1500.com/personalities/joeryan.htm+KSTP+%22Joe+Ryan%22&hl=en

Comment: Contrary to testimony before congress that immediate corrective action was taken by command in late January. Why was Steve Stefanowicz still doing his worst at Abu Gharieb at least thru to 25 April '04 ? Taguba's findings are clear that he had primary contributary guilt. ah, but oh yes, he was'nt a disposable Army reserve MP, was he ?

Joe Ryans diary shows clear evidence for the continued presence at Abu Ghuraib of abusive civilian interrogators working for CACI well into late April '04, the diary is remarkable for its complete ignorance of what was going on in Iraq. Ryan alleges that the Mahdi Army, a militia of Iraqi Shiite young men from the ghettos, was made up of Iranians! And he says that Sistani wants power for himself. If this is what CPA people think in Iraq, no wonder they have screwed up the Occupation so badly.

This is a clear demonstration of collective, pre-meditated criminal intent and acts. Yet another example of the reality of Intelligence activities at Abu Gharieb, now under the 'new improved, on my honour, everything is A-OK now, supervision of Major General Miller. What was happening, is still happening, is systemic and a sanctioned policy. The rotten canker runs deep.

7. Are the classified Rules of Engagement (ROEs) in Iraq acceptable/legal under International Law ? Perhaps an explanation for the consistent, repetitive, inexplicable unjustified/unexplained/uninvestigated 'killings' of Iraqi civilians, especially those in vehicles throughout the occupation (extract from Joe Ryans diary, my emphasis):

Yesterday when the LRS guys went out, LTC Edwards insisted on going on their patrol. He is the MI Battalion Commander and not well liked or respected by anyone on this post. The LTC and his driver did not see fit to actually go to the mission briefs prior to rolling out. A blocking position was set up on one of the overpasses and when a vehicle approached, the LTC's driver opened fire without provocation. As such, the LRS guys, upon hearing fire, traversed and opened fire as well. The Rules of Engagement are that no warning shots are fired. You either fire at a known threat, or do not fire at all. This is established so your fellow soldiers can immediately lay down suppressive fire upon hearing shots fired. Fortunately, they did not kill the driver of the vehicle, only wounded him. His truck is completely useless though. The poor Iraqi was treated by our medical staff and then LTC Edwards made the LRS take the guy back to his home with one of the vehicles from on our compound, plus $500. Now LTC Edwards is downgraded to despised and a joke.

Comment: Appropriate, measured, proportional use of force according to the Laws of War ? What is the true extent of the crimes of our administration, military and Intelligence communities.

8. Another telling extract from Joe Ryan's diary (my emphasis):

25 April

Today was a short day. There were six of us that had to come in early and conduct long interrogations to ensure that certain detainees were only able to be seen, but not talked to. The Iraqi Governing Council came and looked through our mirrors into the booths to see some of the foreign fighters we have detained. They wanted to talk to them and film to show the international media, but we refused, due to not being able to interrupt interrogations. They were much more patient than we thought they would be so they tried to wait us out. Five and a half hours in the booth was a long time, but we finally outlasted them. The IGC left with only the satisfaction that we have foreign fighters from Morocco, Syria, Jordan, and other countries detained here. To be clear, they are not sponsored by their respective countries to come here, but it is due to their individual choices, be it religious or stupidity.

Comment: This is a clear demonstration of collective, pre-meditated criminal intent and acts. Yet another example of the reality of Intelligence activities at Abu Gharieb, now under the 'new improved, on my honour, everything is A-OK now, supersvison of Major General Miller. Note, the Iraqi's, America and the world have been knowingly lied to about the supposed presence of bodies of 100's of 'Foreign fighters' sanctioned by the regions governments. The lies run deep in this administration and unfortunately our militray and intelligence communities. What was happening is still happening, is systemic and a sanctioned policy. The rotten canker appears to run deep.

9. Are we really Liberators in Iraq ?:

My source told me that before we came here, the borders were controlled and there were never any bombing attacks like this in Iraq until the Americans arrived here. Another point is that we can call our being here anything we want, but "liberating force" is only a political name. We are an "occupying force" in the eyes of the Iraqi people and you cannot tell them otherwise because they are not conditioned to play to political spin like Americans are. There is nothing wrong with being an occupying force; that is what we were in Germany and Japan.

Comment: . . . government of the People by the People for, the People shall not perish from the Earth. --Abraham Lincoln or just a by and for a few ?

10. Miscellaneous relevant online references:

Telltale Signs of Torture Lead Family to Demand Answers. Wife, Daughters Tell of Iraqi Man Discharged from U.S. Custody in Coma. http://newstandardnews.net/content/?action=show_item&itemid=275. Note: Includes photographs and clear indication of torture involving electrocution.

What these images of the Abu Ghraib humiliation and torture have done in the United States is collide with the "exalted image and the pseudo-event" of the Bush propaganda apparatus, just as the images of the My Lai massacre did in 1969. That collision between the reality and the real image of war startles civilians here in the La-La Land of wide screen TV and suburban SUV's, and it shakes them out of their opiated shopper dream-state.

My Lai is what General Colin Powell was remembering when he implemented "the Powell Doctrine" for the military, which includes a co-opted press and a vigorous attempt to keep things like flag-draped coffins off of those wide screen TVs. http://www.counterpunch.org/goff05042004.html

In case you missed it: October 22, 2001: FBI Considers Torture as Suspects Stay Silent http://www.commondreams.org/headlines01/1022-01.htm : AMERICAN investigators are considering resorting to harsher interrogation techniques, including torture.

U.S. Troops Treat Elder Iraqi Woman Like A Donkey http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article6149.htm: U.S. soldiers who detained an elderly Iraqi woman last year placed a harness on her, made her crawl on all fours and rode her like a donkey, Prime Minister Tony Blair 's personal human rights envoy to Iraq said Wednesday.

U.S. fails to block U.N. anti-torture vote http://www.japantoday.com/e/?content=news&id=224232 Posted May 5, 2004 10:16 PM PST

Torture of Iraqi POWs Because We Respect Human Rights http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/torture_pow.html(Last Update May 4, 04; 09:55:07 PST) "The U.S. is committed to the worldwide elimination of torture and we are leading this fight by example. I call on all governments to join with the U.S. and the community of law abiding nations in prohibiting, investigating and prosecuting all acts of torture." - George W. Bush http://www.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0311/12/i_ins.00.html, June 26, 2003

Secret law, secret lawsuit http://www.cincypost.com/2004/04/30/edita043004.html Posted May 5, 2004 10:20 AM PST To no one's surprise, the American Civil Liberties Union filed suit challenging the constitutionality of parts of the USA Patriot Act, the sweeping security law passed in the immediate aftermath of 9-11. To what should be everyone's shock, the mere fact of the lawsuit was kept secret under provisions of the act.

Willing Torturers http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A2328-2004May4.html Posted May 5, 2004 08:17 AM PST A few years ago, a scholarly book with the provocative title "Hitler's Willing Executioners" climbed to the top of U.S. bestseller lists. In part the book attracted attention because its author located the origins of the Nazi death camps in the German national character, in German history and in the specific nature of German anti-Semitism. What happened in Germany, he implied, could never happen anywhere else. Certainly it could never happen here. But it did.

Why being right on WMD is no consolation to Iraqi scientist labelled enemy of America http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1209574,00.html Posted May 5, 2004 08:02 AM PST The top Iraqi scientist who insisted that Saddam had destroyed his WMDs (and in hindsight was clearly telling the truth) remains in solitary confinement by American forces, who apparently view telling the truth as the worst of crimes.

FLASHBACK: 'They will do what is needed to get the information - and fast' Posted May 4, 2004 02:41 PM PST http://news.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2003/03/09/walqa309.xml At Bagram, where the White House argues that al-Qa'eda prisoners are "unlawful combatants" and thus not entitled to the protection of the Geneva Convention, the CIA has carte blanche to employ the "stress and duress" techniques that it has honed since the Vietnam war. As one informed CIA official puts it: "Let's just say we are not averse to a little smacky face. After all, if you don't violate a prisoner's human rights some of the time then you aren't doing your job."

http://bellaciao.org/en/article.php3?id_article=967

dangerousdna · Posted: Sun May 09, 2004 11:22 pm Post subject:

TORTURE AT ABU GHRAIB
American soldiers brutalized Iraqis. How far up does the responsibility go?

by SEYMOUR M. HERSH
The New Yorker: Fact
Issue of 2004-05-10 / Posted 2004-05-01

In the era of Saddam Hussein, Abu Ghraib, twenty miles west of Baghdad, was one of the world’s most notorious prisons, with torture, weekly executions, and vile living conditions. As many as fifty thousand men and women—no accurate count is possible—were jammed into Abu Ghraib at one time, in twelve-by-twelve-foot cells that were little more than human holding pits.

In the looting that followed the regime’s collapse, last April, the huge prison complex, by then deserted, was stripped of everything that could be removed, including doors, windows, and bricks. The coalition authorities had the floors tiled, cells cleaned and repaired, and toilets, showers, and a new medical center added. Abu Ghraib was now a U.S. military prison. Most of the prisoners, however—by the fall there were several thousand, including women and teen-agers—were civilians, many of whom had been picked up in random military sweeps and at highway checkpoints. They fell into three loosely defined categories: common criminals; security detainees suspected of “crimes against the coalition”; and a small number of suspected “high-value” leaders of the insurgency against the coalition forces.

Last June, Janis Karpinski, an Army reserve brigadier general, was named commander of the 800th Military Police Brigade and put in charge of military prisons in Iraq. General Karpinski, the only female commander in the war zone, was an experienced operations and intelligence officer who had served with the Special Forces and in the 1991 Gulf War, but she had never run a prison system. Now she was in charge of three large jails, eight battalions, and thirty-four hundred Army reservists, most of whom, like her, had no training in handling prisoners.

General Karpinski, who had wanted to be a soldier since she was five, is a business consultant in civilian life, and was enthusiastic about her new job. In an interview last December with the St. Petersburg Times, she said that, for many of the Iraqi inmates at Abu Ghraib, “living conditions now are better in prison than at home. At one point we were concerned that they wouldn’t want to leave.”

A month later, General Karpinski was formally admonished and quietly suspended, and a major investigation into the Army’s prison system, authorized by Lieutenant General Ricardo S. Sanchez, the senior commander in Iraq, was under way. A fifty-three-page report, obtained by The New Yorker, written by Major General Antonio M. Taguba and not meant for public release, was completed in late February. Its conclusions about the institutional failures of the Army prison system were devastating. Specifically, Taguba found that between October and December of 2003 there were numerous instances of “sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses” at Abu Ghraib. This systematic and illegal abuse of detainees, Taguba reported, was perpetrated by soldiers of the 372nd Military Police Company, and also by members of the American intelligence community. (The 372nd was attached to the 320th M.P. Battalion, which reported to Karpinski’s brigade headquarters.) Taguba’s report listed some of the wrongdoing:

Breaking chemical lights and pouring the phosphoric liquid on detainees; pouring cold water on naked detainees; beating detainees with a broom handle and a chair; threatening male detainees with rape; allowing a military police guard to stitch the wound of a detainee who was injured after being slammed against the wall in his cell; sodomizing a detainee with a chemical light and perhaps a broom stick, and using military working dogs to frighten and intimidate detainees with threats of attack, and in one instance actually biting a detainee.

There was stunning evidence to support the allegations, Taguba added—“detailed witness statements and the discovery of extremely graphic photographic evidence.” Photographs and videos taken by the soldiers as the abuses were happening were not included in his report, Taguba said, because of their “extremely sensitive nature.”

The photographs—several of which were broadcast on CBS’s “60 Minutes 2” last week—show leering G.I.s taunting naked Iraqi prisoners who are forced to assume humiliating poses. Six suspects—Staff Sergeant Ivan L. Frederick II, known as Chip, who was the senior enlisted man; Specialist Charles A. Graner; Sergeant Javal Davis; Specialist Megan Ambuhl; Specialist Sabrina Harman; and Private Jeremy Sivits—are now facing prosecution in Iraq, on charges that include conspiracy, dereliction of duty, cruelty toward prisoners, maltreatment, assault, and indecent acts. A seventh suspect, Private Lynndie England, was reassigned to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, after becoming pregnant.

The photographs tell it all. In one, Private England, a cigarette dangling from her mouth, is giving a jaunty thumbs-up sign and pointing at the genitals of a young Iraqi, who is naked except for a sandbag over his head, as he masturbates. Three other hooded and naked Iraqi prisoners are shown, hands reflexively crossed over their genitals. A fifth prisoner has his hands at his sides. In another, England stands arm in arm with Specialist Graner; both are grinning and giving the thumbs-up behind a cluster of perhaps seven naked Iraqis, knees bent, piled clumsily on top of each other in a pyramid. There is another photograph of a cluster of naked prisoners, again piled in a pyramid. Near them stands Graner, smiling, his arms crossed; a woman soldier stands in front of him, bending over, and she, too, is smiling. Then, there is another cluster of hooded bodies, with a female soldier standing in front, taking photographs. Yet another photograph shows a kneeling, naked, unhooded male prisoner, head momentarily turned away from the camera, posed to make it appear that he is performing oral sex on another male prisoner, who is naked and hooded.

Such dehumanization is unacceptable in any culture, but it is especially so in the Arab world. Homosexual acts are against Islamic law and it is humiliating for men to be naked in front of other men, Bernard Haykel, a professor of Middle Eastern studies at New York University, explained. “Being put on top of each other and forced to masturbate, being naked in front of each other—it’s all a form of torture,” Haykel said.

Two Iraqi faces that do appear in the photographs are those of dead men. There is the battered face of prisoner No. 153399, and the bloodied body of another prisoner, wrapped in cellophane and packed in ice. There is a photograph of an empty room, splattered with blood.

The 372nd’s abuse of prisoners seemed almost routine—a fact of Army life that the soldiers felt no need to hide. On April 9th, at an Article 32 hearing (the military equivalent of a grand jury) in the case against Sergeant Frederick, at Camp Victory, near Baghdad, one of the witnesses, Specialist Matthew Wisdom, an M.P., told the courtroom what happened when he and other soldiers delivered seven prisoners, hooded and bound, to the so-called “hard site” at Abu Ghraib—seven tiers of cells where the inmates who were considered the most dangerous were housed. The men had been accused of starting a riot in another section of the prison. Wisdom said:

SFC Snider grabbed my prisoner and threw him into a pile. . . . I do not think it was right to put them in a pile. I saw SSG Frederic, SGT Davis and CPL Graner walking around the pile hitting the prisoners. I remember SSG Frederick hitting one prisoner in the side of its [sic] ribcage. The prisoner was no danger to SSG Frederick. . . . I left after that.

When he returned later, Wisdom testified:

I saw two naked detainees, one masturbating to another kneeling with its mouth open. I thought I should just get out of there. I didn’t think it was right . . . I saw SSG Frederick walking towards me, and he said, “Look what these animals do when you leave them alone for two seconds.” I heard PFC England shout out, “He’s getting hard.”

Wisdom testified that he told his superiors what had happened, and assumed that “the issue was taken care of.” He said, “I just didn’t want to be part of anything that looked criminal.”

The abuses became public because of the outrage of Specialist Joseph M. Darby, an M.P. whose role emerged during the Article 32 hearing against Chip Frederick. A government witness, Special Agent Scott Bobeck, who is a member of the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division, or C.I.D., told the court, according to an abridged transcript made available to me, “The investigation started after SPC Darby . . . got a CD from CPL Graner. . . . He came across pictures of naked detainees.” Bobeck said that Darby had “initially put an anonymous letter under our door, then he later came forward and gave a sworn statement. He felt very bad about it and thought it was very wrong.”

Questioned further, the Army investigator said that Frederick and his colleagues had not been given any “training guidelines” that he was aware of. The M.P.s in the 372nd had been assigned to routine traffic and police duties upon their arrival in Iraq, in the spring of 2003. In October of 2003, the 372nd was ordered to prison-guard duty at Abu Ghraib. Frederick, at thirty-seven, was far older than his colleagues, and was a natural leader; he had also worked for six years as a guard for the Virginia

Department of Corrections. Bobeck explained:

What I got is that SSG Frederick and CPL Graner were road M.P.s and were put in charge because they were civilian prison guards and had knowledge of how things were supposed to be run.

Bobeck also testified that witnesses had said that Frederick, on one occasion, “had punched a detainee in the chest so hard that the detainee almost went into cardiac arrest.”

At the Article 32 hearing, the Army informed Frederick and his attorneys, Captain Robert Shuck, an Army lawyer, and Gary Myers, a civilian, that two dozen witnesses they had sought, including General Karpinski and all of Frederick’s co-defendants, would not appear. Some had been excused after exercising their Fifth Amendment right; others were deemed to be too far away from the courtroom. “The purpose of an Article 32 hearing is for us to engage witnesses and discover facts,” Gary Myers told me. “We ended up with a c.i.d. agent and no alleged victims to examine.” After the hearing, the presiding investigative officer ruled that there was sufficient evidence to convene a court-martial against Frederick.

Myers, who was one of the military defense attorneys in the My Lai prosecutions of the nineteen-seventies, told me that his client’s defense will be that he was carrying out the orders of his superiors and, in particular, the directions of military intelligence. He said, “Do you really think a group of kids from rural Virginia decided to do this on their own? Decided that the best way to embarrass Arabs and make them talk was to have them walk around nude?”

In letters and e-mails to family members, Frederick repeatedly noted that the military-intelligence teams, which included C.I.A. officers and linguists and interrogation specialists from private defense contractors, were the dominant force inside Abu Ghraib. In a letter written in January, he said:

I questioned some of the things that I saw . . . such things as leaving inmates in their cell with no clothes or in female underpants, handcuffing them to the door of their cell—and the answer I got was, “This is how military intelligence (MI) wants it done.” . . . . MI has also instructed us to place a prisoner in an isolation cell with little or no clothes, no toilet or running water, no ventilation or window, for as much as three days.

The military-intelligence officers have “encouraged and told us, ‘Great job,’ they were now getting positive results and information,” Frederick wrote. “CID has been present when the military working dogs were used to intimidate prisoners at MI’s request.” At one point, Frederick told his family, he pulled aside his superior officer, Lieutenant Colonel Jerry Phillabaum, the commander of the 320th M.P. Battalion, and asked about the mistreatment of prisoners. “His reply was ‘Don’t worry about it.’”

In November, Frederick wrote, an Iraqi prisoner under the control of what the Abu Ghraib guards called “O.G.A.,” or other government agencies—that is, the C.I.A. and its paramilitary employees—was brought to his unit for questioning. “They stressed him out so bad that the man passed away. They put his body in a body bag and packed him in ice for approximately twenty-four hours in the shower. . . . The next day the medics came and put his body on a stretcher, placed a fake IV in his arm and took him away.” The dead Iraqi was never entered into the prison’s inmate-control system, Frederick recounted, “and therefore never had a number.”

Frederick’s defense is, of course, highly self-serving. But the complaints in his letters and e-mails home were reinforced by two internal Army reports—Taguba’s and one by the Army’s chief law-enforcement officer, Provost Marshal Donald Ryder, a major general.

Last fall, General Sanchez ordered Ryder to review the prison system in Iraq and recommend ways to improve it. Ryder’s report, filed on November 5th, concluded that there were potential human-rights, training, and manpower issues, system-wide, that needed immediate attention. It also discussed serious concerns about the tension between the missions of the military police assigned to guard the prisoners and the intelligence teams who wanted to interrogate them. Army regulations limit intelligence activity by the M.P.s to passive collection. But something had gone wrong at Abu Ghraib.

There was evidence dating back to the Afghanistan war, the Ryder report said, that M.P.s had worked with intelligence operatives to “set favorable conditions for subsequent interviews”—a euphemism for breaking the will of prisoners. “Such actions generally run counter to the smooth operation of a detention facility, attempting to maintain its population in a compliant and docile state.” General Karpinski’s brigade, Ryder reported, “has not been directed to change its facility procedures to set the conditions for MI interrogations, nor participate in those interrogations.” Ryder called for the establishment of procedures to “define the role of military police soldiers . . .clearly separating the actions of the guards from those of the military intelligence personnel.” The officers running the war in Iraq were put on notice.

Ryder undercut his warning, however, by concluding that the situation had not yet reached a crisis point. Though some procedures were flawed, he said, he found “no military police units purposely applying inappropriate confinement practices.” His investigation was at best a failure and at worst a coverup.

Taguba, in his report, was polite but direct in refuting his fellow-general. “Unfortunately, many of the systemic problems that surfaced during [Ryder’s] assessment are the very same issues that are the subject of this investigation,” he wrote. “In fact, many of the abuses suffered by detainees occurred during, or near to, the time of that assessment.” The report continued, “Contrary to the findings of MG Ryder’s report, I find that personnel assigned to the 372nd MP Company, 800th MP Brigade were directed to change facility procedures to ‘set the conditions’ for MI interrogations.” Army intelligence officers, C.I.A. agents, and private contractors “actively requested that MP guards set physical and mental conditions for favorable interrogation of witnesses.”

Taguba backed up his assertion by citing evidence from sworn statements to Army C.I.D. investigators. Specialist Sabrina Harman, one of the accused M.P.s, testified that it was her job to keep detainees awake, including one hooded prisoner who was placed on a box with wires attached to his fingers, toes, and penis. She stated, “MI wanted to get them to talk. It is Graner and Frederick’s job to do things for MI and OGA to get these people to talk.”

Another witness, Sergeant Javal Davis, who is also one of the accused, told C.I.D. investigators, “I witnessed prisoners in the MI hold section . . . being made to do various things that I would question morally. . . . We were told that they had different rules.” Taguba wrote, “Davis also stated that he had heard MI insinuate to the guards to abuse the inmates. When asked what MI said he stated: ‘Loosen this guy up for us.’‘Make sure he has a bad night.’‘Make sure he gets the treatment.’” Military intelligence made these comments to Graner and Frederick, Davis said. “The MI staffs to my understanding have been giving Graner compliments . . . statements like, ‘Good job, they’re breaking down real fast. They answer every question. They’re giving out good information.’”

When asked why he did not inform his chain of command about the abuse, Sergeant Davis answered, “Because I assumed that if they were doing things out of the ordinary or outside the guidelines, someone would have said something. Also the wing”—where the abuse took place—“belongs to MI and it appeared MI personnel approved of the abuse.”

Another witness, Specialist Jason Kennel, who was not accused of wrongdoing, said, “I saw them nude, but MI would tell us to take away their mattresses, sheets, and clothes.” (It was his view, he added, that if M.I. wanted him to do this “they needed to give me paperwork.”) Taguba also cited an interview with Adel L. Nakhla, a translator who was an employee of Titan, a civilian contractor. He told of one night when a “bunch of people from MI” watched as a group of handcuffed and shackled inmates were subjected to abuse by Graner and Frederick.

General Taguba saved his harshest words for the military-intelligence officers and private contractors. He recommended that Colonel Thomas Pappas, the commander of one of the M.I. brigades, be reprimanded and receive non-judicial punishment, and that Lieutenant Colonel Steven Jordan, the former director of the Joint Interrogation and Debriefing Center, be relieved of duty and reprimanded. He further urged that a civilian contractor, Steven Stephanowicz, of CACI International, be fired from his Army job, reprimanded, and denied his security clearances for lying to the investigating team and allowing or ordering military policemen “who were not trained in interrogation techniques to facilitate interrogations by ‘setting conditions’ which were neither authorized” nor in accordance with Army regulations. “He clearly knew his instructions equated to physical abuse,” Taguba wrote. He also recommended disciplinary action against a second CACI employee, John Israel. (A spokeswoman for CACI said that the company had “received no formal communication” from the Army about the matter.)

“I suspect,” Taguba concluded, that Pappas, Jordan, Stephanowicz, and Israel “were either directly or indirectly responsible for the abuse at Abu Ghraib,” and strongly recommended immediate disciplinary action.

The problems inside the Army prison system in Iraq were not hidden from senior commanders. During Karpinski’s seven-month tour of duty, Taguba noted, there were at least a dozen officially reported incidents involving escapes, attempted escapes, and other serious security issues that were investigated by officers of the 800th M.P. Brigade. Some of the incidents had led to the killing or wounding of inmates and M.P.s, and resulted in a series of “lessons learned” inquiries within the brigade. Karpinski invariably approved the reports and signed orders calling for changes in day-to-day procedures. But Taguba found that she did not follow up, doing nothing to insure that the orders were carried out. Had she done so, he added, “cases of abuse may have been prevented.”

General Taguba further found that Abu Ghraib was filled beyond capacity, and that the M.P. guard force was significantly undermanned and short of resources. “This imbalance has contributed to the poor living conditions, escapes, and accountability lapses,” he wrote. There were gross differences, Taguba said, between the actual number of prisoners on hand and the number officially recorded. A lack of proper screening also meant that many innocent Iraqis were wrongly being detained—indefinitely, it seemed, in some cases. The Taguba study noted that more than sixty per cent of the civilian inmates at Abu Ghraib were deemed not to be a threat to society, which should have enabled them to be released. Karpinski’s defense, Taguba said, was that her superior officers “routinely” rejected her recommendations regarding the release of such prisoners.

Karpinski was rarely seen at the prisons she was supposed to be running, Taguba wrote. He also found a wide range of administrative problems, including some that he considered “without precedent in my military career.” The soldiers, he added, were “poorly prepared and untrained . . . prior to deployment, at the mobilization site, upon arrival in theater, and throughout the mission.”

General Taguba spent more than four hours interviewing Karpinski, whom he described as extremely emotional: “What I found particularly disturbing in her testimony was her complete unwillingness to either understand or accept that many of the problems inherent in the 800th MP Brigade were caused or exacerbated by poor leadership and the refusal of her command to both establish and enforce basic standards and principles among its soldiers.”

Taguba recommended that Karpinski and seven brigade military-police officers and enlisted men be relieved of command and formally reprimanded. No criminal proceedings were suggested for Karpinski; apparently, the loss of promotion and the indignity of a public rebuke were seen as enough punishment.

After the story broke on CBS last week, the Pentagon announced that Major General Geoffrey Miller, the new head of the Iraqi prison system, had arrived in Baghdad and was on the job. He had been the commander of the Guantánamo Bay detention center. General Sanchez also authorized an investigation into possible wrongdoing by military and civilian interrogators.

As the international furor grew, senior military officers, and President Bush, insisted that the actions of a few did not reflect the conduct of the military as a whole. Taguba’s report, however, amounts to an unsparing study of collective wrongdoing and the failure of Army leadership at the highest levels. The picture he draws of Abu Ghraib is one in which Army regulations and the Geneva conventions were routinely violated, and in which much of the day-to-day management of the prisoners was abdicated to Army military-intelligence units and civilian contract employees. Interrogating prisoners and getting intelligence, including by intimidation and torture, was the priority.

The mistreatment at Abu Ghraib may have done little to further American intelligence, however. Willie J. Rowell, who served for thirty-six years as a C.I.D. agent, told me that the use of force or humiliation with prisoners is invariably counterproductive. “They’ll tell you what you want to hear, truth or no truth,” Rowell said. “‘You can flog me until I tell you what I know you want me to say.’ You don’t get righteous information.”

Under the fourth Geneva convention, an occupying power can jail civilians who pose an “imperative” security threat, but it must establish a regular procedure for insuring that only civilians who remain a genuine security threat be kept imprisoned. Prisoners have the right to appeal any internment decision and have their cases reviewed. Human Rights Watch complained to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld that civilians in Iraq remained in custody month after month with no charges brought against them. Abu Ghraib had become, in effect, another Guantánamo.

As the photographs from Abu Ghraib make clear, these detentions have had enormous consequences: for the imprisoned civilian Iraqis, many of whom had nothing to do with the growing insurgency; for the integrity of the Army; and for the United States’ reputation in the world.

Captain Robert Shuck, Frederick’s military attorney, closed his defense at the Article 32 hearing last month by saying that the Army was “attempting to have these six soldiers atone for its sins.” Similarly, Gary Myers, Frederick’s civilian attorney, told me that he would argue at the court-martial that culpability in the case extended far beyond his client. “I’m going to drag every involved intelligence officer and civilian contractor I can find into court,” he said. “Do you really believe the Army relieved a general officer because of six soldiers? Not a chance.”

Top · Posted: Mon May 10, 2004 7:40 am Post subject:

Note the names:

Stephanowicz and Israel.

Both "Contractors".

CACI?

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Is Israel behind the orders for the tortures in Iraq?