Abu Ghraib revisited

[Mycroft]

The US army found Col Thomas Pappas guilty of two counts of dereliction of duty, including that of allowing dogs to be present during interrogations.

Col Pappas was in charge of military intelligence personnel at the prison near the Iraqi capital, Baghdad.

Last week, former commander of the jail Brig Gen Janis Karpinski was demoted.

Nine junior US soldiers have been charged in connection with the abuse at the prison in late 2003, and seven of them have already been convicted.

'Non-sanctioned interrogation technique'

The verdict came at the end of a hearing in Kaiserslautern, Germany, in which Col Pappas presented evidence in his defence.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4539033.stm

Comments?

 

[CBL4]

Too little punishment and still too few and too low ranking officers.

A wink and a nod for the actions came from the top - not just top of the military but the politicians who run the military.
The damage this did to the US's reputation is immense. The actions were dispicable. Prison terms and impeachment are appropriate.

CBL

 

[punchdrunk]

From Andrew Sullivan's piece in the Times (UK) in January:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2088-1431300_1,00.html

.... But the evidence we do have — all in government documents — is that Gonzales’s legal judgments as White House counsel upheld the argument that the president was entitled as commander-in-chief to sanction the torture of detainees in the war on terror anywhere in the world.

Gonzales argued that Al-Qaeda prisoners did not qualify for protection under the Geneva conventions, and that even if they did, the president had the authority to overrule both those conventions and American law forbidding torture. Another memo from the Justice Department defined torture in a narrow way, permitting what most reasonable people would think of as brutality in the interrogation of terrorist suspects.

The president, exercising the powers granted him by Gonzales, nevertheless decided he would grant all terror war prisoners Geneva protection — at his discretion. The defence secretary subsequently approved the use of non-Geneva techniques at Guantanamo Bay for a few weeks before rescinding the order. And only last week, the administration formally withdrew its lax policy.

We also know that the administration sent the general responsible for interrogation at Guantanamo Bay to overhaul interrogation at Abu Ghraib. After that, the worst abuses occurred.

That’s all we know for certain about the direct policy directives of top Bush officials. Last week they declined to release more memos or documents to the Gonzales hearings.

The consequences? Well, we now know a great deal about what has gone on in US detention facilities under the Bush administration. Several government and Red Cross reports detail the way many detainees have been treated.

We know for certain that the US has tortured five inmates to death. We know that 23 others have died in US custody in suspicious circumstances. We know that torture has been practised by almost every branch of the US military in sites all over the world — from Abu Ghraib to Tikrit, Mosul, Basra, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay.

We know that no incidents of abuse have been reported in regular internment facilities and that hundreds have occurred in prisons geared to getting intelligence. We know that thousands of men, women and children were grabbed almost at random from their homes in Baghdad, taken to Saddam’s former torture palace and subjected to abuse, murder, beatings, semi-crucifixions and rape.

All of this is detailed in the official reports. What has been perpetrated in secret prisons to “ghost detainees” hidden from Red Cross inspection we do not know. We may never know.