Bad Apples at the Top of the Barrel

Raw Story brings us new revelations on the Abu Ghraib torture affair:

New Army documents released by the American Civil Liberties Union today reveal that Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez ordered interrogators to "go to the outer limits" to get information from detainees. The documents also show that senior government officials were aware of abuse in Iraq and Afghanistan before the Abu Ghraib scandal broke…

… Among the documents released today by the ACLU is a May 19, 2004 Defense Intelligence Agency document implicating Sanchez in potentially abusive interrogation techniques. In the document, an officer in charge of a team of interrogators stated that there was a 35-page order spelling out the rules of engagement that interrogators were supposed to follow, and that they were encouraged to "go to the outer limits to get information from the detainees by people who wanted the information." When asked to whom the officer was referring, the officer answered "LTG Sanchez." The officer stated that the expectation coming from "Headquarters" was to break the detainees…

The ACLU said the document makes clear that while President Bush and other officials assured the world that what occurred at Abu Ghraib was the work of "a few bad apples," the government knew that abuse was happening in numerous facilities in Iraq and Afghanistan. Of the 62 cases being investigated at the time, at least 26 involved detainee deaths. Some of the cases had already gone through a court-martial proceeding. The abuses went beyond Abu Ghraib, and touched Camp Cropper, Camp Bucca and other detention centers in Mosul, Samarra, Baghdad, Tikrit, as well as Orgun-E in Afghanistan.

It always was a stretch of the imagination to believe that Sanchez, then commander of the coalition forces in Iraq, was entirely out of the loop in the goings on in Abu Ghraib. Back in May of 2004, Sanchez told the Senate Armed Services Committee that the Abu Ghraib interrogation rules had been written at the company commander level, and that he had no role in preparing or approving them.


We now know that the interrogation practice paper trail leads back to the highest levels of the Bush administration. Steven Shafersman of Texas Citizens for Science has compiled a fairly encompassing collection of links and articles on the subject here.

Janet Karpinski is the senior officer to have been punished over the Abu Ghraib abuses. President Bush demoted her from brigadier general to colonel and she subsequently retired. Her punishment was "administrative," and such did not amount to a conviction on criminal charges. A number of junior officers and enlisted personnel, like Private Lindie England, have been criminally charged and convicted.

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Our war on terror torture record is disturbing at so many levels it's difficult to know where to begin describing them. What perhaps disturbs me most is that I can't feel outrage over this matter any more because I'm all outraged out. Once again, I'm seeing a smoking gun that proves what I more or less already knew, and chances are that this story will fall off the radar thanks to the electronic interference from the other outrageous stories I'm already out of outrage over and the all outrages we haven't heard about yet that will seem tame because the outrage threshold has been set so high that it's impossible to get outraged about anything any more. The human nervous system can only absorb so much.

Here's another thing I can't get outraged about any more. We're never going to get to the bottom this outrage or any other outrageous act of this administration as long as the only investigation of the administration's outrages are conducted by the outrageous administration itself.

Yeah, there's a good chance the Democrats will wrest control of both Houses of Congress come November which would give them control of all the investigative committees. But if they try to conduct an honest investigation of every Bush administration outrage, they'll never get anything else done.

So they'll have to prioritize, do a "triage" of outrage, if you will, and pick and choose who and what they can actually bring to justice.

Let's hope they focus on the apples at the top of the barrel, and not on the Lindsie Englands.