[Mb-civic] NYTimes.com Article: Abu Ghraib, Whitewashed

Sat Jul 24 09:53:01 PDT 2004

The article below from NYTimes.com 
has been sent to you by michael at intrafi.com.

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Abu Ghraib, Whitewashed

July 24, 2004

A week ago, John Warner, chairman of the Senate Armed
Services Committee, said he was satisfied that Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was keeping his promise to leave
no stone unturned to investigate the atrocities of Abu
Ghraib prison. A newly released report by the Army's
inspector general shows that Mr. Rumsfeld's team may be
turning over stones, but it's not looking under them. 

The authors of this 300-page whitewash say they found no
"systemic" problem - even though there were 94 documented
cases of prisoner abuse, including some 40 deaths, 20 of
them homicides; even though only four prisons of the 16
they visited had copies of the Geneva Conventions; even
though Abu Ghraib was a cesspool with one shower for every
50 inmates; even though the military police were improperly
involved in interrogations; even though young people
plucked from civilian life were sent to guard prisoners -
50,000 of them in all - with no training. 

Never mind any of that. The report pins most of the blame
on those depressingly familiar culprits, a few soldiers who
behaved badly. It does grudgingly concede that "in some
cases, abuse was accompanied by leadership failure at the
tactical level," but the report absolves anyone of rank, in
keeping with the investigation's spirit. The inspector
general's staff did not dig into the abuse cases, but
merely listed them. It based its findings on the comical
observation that "commanders, leaders and soldiers treated
detainees humanely" while investigators from the Pentagon
were watching. And it made no attempt to find out who had
authorized threatening prisoners with dogs and sexually
humiliating hooded men, to name two American practices the
Red Cross found to be common. The inspector general's
see-no-evil team simply said it couldn't find those
"approach techniques" in the Army field manual. 

Even the report's release on Thursday was an exercise in
misdirection, timed to be overshadowed by the 9/11
commission's report. Senators on the armed services panel
were outraged at the report's shoddiness and timing, but
should not have been surprised. The Defense Department has
consistently tried to stymie Mr. Warner's investigation. It
"misplaced" thousands of pages from Maj. Gen. Antonio
Taguba's report on Abu Ghraib, the only credible military
account so far. It stalled the completion of a pivotal look
at Army intelligence by two other Army generals until
lawmakers went off to the political conventions and summer
vacations. And it ignored Senate demands for the Red Cross
reports on American military prisons for months. 

The Pentagon finally brought those documents to the Senate
in the last two weeks, in a way that ensured they would be
of minimal use. The voluminous reports were shown briefly
to senators and a few members of the Armed Services
Committee staff after the senators' personal aides were
ushered out. Then the reports were hauled back to the
Pentagon. 

Mr. Warner has admirably resisted pressure from the White
House and Republican leaders in Congress to stop his
investigation. But he is showing signs of losing appetite
for the fight. Mr. Warner held only one hearing in the last
month - on the new report - and agreed to the ground rules
on the Red Cross reports. We've always been skeptical that
the Defense Department can investigate itself credibly, and
now it's obvious that it plans to stick to the "few bad
apples" excuse. The only way to learn why innocent Iraqis
were tortured by American soldiers is a formal
Congressional inquiry, with subpoena power. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/24/opinion/24sat1.html?ex=1091687981&ei=1&en=ee08b3857dabbd9f

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