Seymour M. Hersh of the New Yorker has an incredible inside account of the Iraqi torture at Abu Ghraib prison. It's a lengthy piece, and has some shocking graphic descriptions of inmate abuses, but Waingroh strongly encourages everyone to read it (Hersh also said on Wolf Blitzer that he has a lot more to tell, but - get this - he's actually waiting until he can prove the stories before putting them in print). Head over to Billmon for a follow up story.
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.
In brief, the Taguba report explains that the issue of prison conditions at Abu Ghraib (which was the former torture center of Saddam's regime) was brought up 3 different times by officers under General Sanchez, and were ignored - until, of course, the public release of the now infamous photos just last week. In other words, those photos were definitely NOT an isolated case or anything new. It seems Abu Ghraib was run mostly by young Army Reservists, Military Police, private contractors, gas station attendants, night shift workers from McDonald's, and even a few teenagers from the Family Fun Center. Most detainees were civilians picked at random, and served no useful intelligence purpose, but were nonetheless locked away without a charge indefinitely.
There's no need for Waingroh to address the political consequences of this article - it speaks for itself. This isn't a partisan issue. This is the shit that happens when you have an internationally unsupported war, justified by lies, carried out by confused soldiers with dying morale due to extended tours - who are treated with hatred daily from the very people their bumbling Clown-in-Chief promised to liberate, because said Monkey is too busy talking about the difference between medals and ribbons instead of doing his job - which, I quote, is: "protecting the lives of the American people". With six more troops dead today, it's clear W. doesn't view our soldiers as a part of that category. Instead, they are tools. And as Stanley Kubrick so visually taught us in the movie 2001, monkeys like using tools. To smash things.
HAL (eburton): "What are you doing, George?"