Remember Abu Ghraib?

[Guest guest]

http://www.motherjones.com/news/dailymojo/2004/08/08_510.html

 

August 6, 2004

Remember Abu Ghraib?

 

You have to flip all the way to page A14 of Thursday's

Washington Post to find breaking news about Abu

Ghraib. During a preliminary court hearing for Pfc.

Lynndie England, a prison staffer testified that

military intelligence officials had ordered prisoners

to be kept out of sight from the Red Cross.

 

Recall that two months ago, at a press conference,

Donald Rumsfeld played dumb when asked about detainees

kept away from monitors:

 

Q: But then why wasn't the -- why wasn't the Red

Cross told, and there are other such prisoners being

detained without the knowledge of the Red Cross?

 

SEC. RUMSFELD: There are -- there are instances

where that occurs. And a request was made to do that,

and we did.

 

But according to Staff Sgt. Christopher Ward,

detainees were willfully kept out of sight when the

Red Cross came to visit. That doesn't sound like

" instances. " That sounds like a systematic problem.

Newsweek sounded more bad news for Rumsfeld, after

learning that the Defense Secretary's hand-picked

investigative panel, headed by James Schlesinger, is

expected to blame top Pentagon officials, including

Rumsfeld himself, for the conditions at Abu Ghraib.

The report, due out on August 18, will likely point

out " that Rumsfeld and senior officials failed early

on to set up clear, baseline rules for

interrogations. "

 

Newsweek's revelations aside, it's been difficult to

get any genuine updates on the torture story. Across

the Atlantic, Scotland's Sunday Herald recently

discovered that there are up to 107 child prisoners

being held in Iraq, according to a UNICEF report that

has not been made public. (Last month, IRIN made

similar allegations, complaining that human rights

groups have not been allowed to see child detainees.)

The Herald also chronicled some absolutely sickening

evidence for child torture in Abu Ghraib:

 

It was early last October that Kasim Mehaddi Hilas

says he witnessed the rape of a boy prisoner aged

about 15 in the notorious Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

“The kid was hurting very bad and they covered all the

doors with sheets,” he said in a statement given to

investigators probing prisoner abuse in Abu Ghraib.

“Then, when I heard the screaming I climbed the door …

and I saw [the soldier’s name is deleted] who was

wearing a military uniform.” Hilas, who was himself

threatened with being sexually assaulted in Abu Graib,

then describes in horrific detail how the soldier

raped “the little kid”.

 

Meanwhile, Rolling Stone got its hands on the

classified annexes to the prison report by Maj. Gen.

Antonio Taguba. The annexes accuse high-ranking

military officials of setting conditions for torture

in Abu Ghraib. In particular, Maj. Gen. Geoffrey

Miller, who currently runs all of the prisons in Iraq,

was sent to Abu Ghraib in order to speed up the

intelligence-gathering process. Miller recommended

that the jailers should become " actively engaged in

setting the conditions for successful exploitation of

the internees. " The end result was entirely

predictable:

 

A former Army intelligence officer tells Rolling

Stone that the intent of Miller's report was clear to

everyone involved: " It means treat the detainees like

shit until they will sell their mother for a blanket,

some food without bugs in it and some sleep. "

 

The Rolling Stone story is deeply disturbing. Worse,

perhaps, was the recent admission by senior Army

criminal investigators, that the abused inmates had

" little or no intelligence value to the United

States. "

 

Finally, in another shocking story buried deep in the

back pages, the Washington Post noted that CACI

International recently won a $23 million interrogation

contract with the Army. CACI, recall, is facing a

federal lawsuit from the Center for Constitutional

Rights, which has alleged that the contractors engaged

in an intentional " scheme to torture, rape, and in

some instances summarily execute plaintiffs. "

Obviously the Army has a right to hire whoever it

thinks will do the best job, but at a time when our

popularity in the Middle East is perilously low, is

this the really best idea? Is this what President Bush

meant when he announced, " People will be brought to

justice " ?

 

So many stories; where is our media? We shouldn't have

to rely on a Scottish newspaper and a music magazine

to get the inside dirt on child torture. Reporters

need to wake up. Already, the scandal is fading fast

from our collective memory. When the Office of the

Inspector General's report came out, blaming the

abuses on a few individuals, both the New York Times

and the Washington Post admirably accused the Army of

a cover-up. But after that, there was little

follow-up.

 

American Journalism Review has an interesting write-up

of why the American media has been so slow to break

Abu Ghraib. Until the big stories by Seymour Hersh in

The New Yorker, along with the first wave of pictures

from CBS, journalists had reported almost nothing on

the incident. AJR lists several possible reasons for

the failure: lack of resources, the difficulties of

reporting in Iraq, reporters worried about " liberal

media " charges, stonewalling by the White House.

 

But for whatever reason, the major print media failed

to put the pieces together. At most, newspapers would

print little snippets about torture allegations and

prison investigations, deep in their back pages. No

one thought to connect the dots, until Seymour Hersh

did. Now, more snippets are emerging, about the

torture of children, about the concealment of

prisoners, about cover-ups and whitewashes. How long

will this new stretch of silence last?

 

-Bradford Plumer