Wired has obtained previously unreleased photos from the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, taken from a presentation by Philip Zimbardo on how ordinary people can, under the right circumstances, become evil. Evil, indeed.

Innocent of the actual offenses… Guilty of talking about it. And black is white. Up is down.

I know being labeled a republican meant “full and complete pardon and automatic forgiveness for any and all offenses.” I guess the army has the same ideology. Both have the “do as I say, not as I do” mentality.

Split verdict for Abu Ghraib interrogation chief

He’s found guilty of disobeying an order, could get up to 5 years

FORT MEADE, Md. - A military court Tuesday acquitted an Army officer of charges that he failed to control U.S. soldiers at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, but it found him guilty of disobeying an order.
[...]

It acquitted [Army Lt. Col. Steven J.] Jordan of three counts: cruelty and maltreatment for subjecting detainees to forced nudity and intimidation by dogs; dereliction of a duty to properly train and supervise soldiers in humane interrogation rules; and failing to obey a lawful general order by ordering dogs used for interrogations without higher approval.

Jordan was found guilty of one: disobeying a general’s order not to talk to others about the investigation into the abuse.

Associated Press

Source: MSNBC.com

Keith Olberman talks to P.J. Crowley about General Taguba’s report on Abu Grhraib.

Seymour Hersh on Hardball talks about his interview with General Taguba, regarding Abu Ghraib torture.

How Antonio Taguba, who investigated the Abu Ghraib scandal, became one of its casualties.

by Seymour M. Hersh
from The New Yorker

On the afternoon of May 6, 2004, Army Major General Antonio M. Taguba was summoned to meet, for the first time, with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in his Pentagon conference room. Rumsfeld and his senior staff were to testify the next day, in televised hearings before the Senate and the House Armed Services Committees, about abuses at Abu Ghraib prison, in Iraq. The previous week, revelations about Abu Ghraib, including photographs showing prisoners stripped, abused, and sexually humiliated, had appeared on CBS and in The New Yorker. In response, Administration officials had insisted that only a few low-ranking soldiers were involved and that America did not torture prisoners. They emphasized that the Army itself had uncovered the scandal.

If there was a redeeming aspect to the affair, it was in the thoroughness and the passion of the Army’s initial investigation. The inquiry had begun in January, and was led by General Taguba, who was stationed in Kuwait at the time. Taguba filed his report in March. In it he found:

Numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses were inflicted on several detainees . . . systemic and illegal abuse.

Taguba was met at the door of the conference room by an old friend, Lieutenant General Bantz J. Craddock, who was Rumsfeld’s senior military assistant. Craddock’s daughter had been a babysitter for Taguba’s two children when the officers served together years earlier at Fort Stewart, Georgia. But that afternoon, Taguba recalled, “Craddock just said, very coldly, A-Wait here.- ” In a series of interviews early this year, the first he has given, Taguba told me that he understood when he began the inquiry that it could damage his career; early on, a senior general in Iraq had pointed out to him that the abused detainees were “only Iraqis.” Even so, he was not prepared for the greeting he received when he was finally ushered in.

“Here . . . comes . . . that famous General Taguba-of the Taguba report!” Rumsfeld declared, in a mocking voice. The meeting was attended by Paul Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld’s deputy; Stephen Cambone, the Under-Secretary of Defense for Intelligence; General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (J.C.S.); and General Peter Schoomaker, the Army chief of staff, along with Craddock and other officials. Taguba, describing the moment nearly three years later, said, sadly, “I thought they wanted to know. I assumed they wanted to know. I was ignorant of the setting.”

In the meeting, the officials professed ignorance about Abu Ghraib. “Could you tell us what happened?” Wolfowitz asked. Someone else asked, “Is it abuse or torture?” At that point, Taguba recalled, “I described a naked detainee lying on the wet floor, handcuffed, with an interrogator shoving things up his rectum, and said, A-That’s not abuse. That’s torture.- There was quiet.”

Rumsfeld was particularly concerned about how the classified report had become public. “General,” he asked, “who do you think leaked the report?” Taguba responded that perhaps a senior military leader who knew about the investigation had done so. “It was just my speculation,” he recalled. “Rumsfeld didn-t say anything.” (I did not meet Taguba until mid-2006 and obtained his report elsewhere.) Rumsfeld also complained about not being given the information he needed. “Here I am,” Taguba recalled Rumsfeld saying, “just a Secretary of Defense, and we have not seen a copy of your report. I have not seen the photographs, and I have to testify to Congress tomorrow and talk about this.” As Rumsfeld spoke, Taguba said, “He’s looking at me. It was a statement.”

read more at THE NEW YORKER

Many of the controversial interrogation tactics used against terror suspects in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo were modeled on techniques the U.S. feared that the Communists themselves might use against captured American troops during the Cold War, according to a little-noticed, highly classified Pentagon report released several days ago. Originally developed as training for elite special forces at Fort Bragg under the “Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape” program, otherwise known as SERE, tactics such as sleep deprivation, isolation, sexual humiliation, nudity, exposure to extremes of cold and stress positions were part of a carefully monitored survival training program for personnel at risk of capture by Soviet or Chinese forces, all carried out under the supervision of military psychologists.

This troubling disclosure was made in the blandly titled report, “Review of DoD-Directed Investigations of Detainee Abuse”, which for the first time sets forth the origins as well as new details of many of the abusive interrogation techniques that led to scandals at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and elsewhere - techniques that some critics contend the Pentagon still has not gone far enough in explicitly banning. Sen. Carl Levin, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, called the findings “deeply troubling,” and signaled his intention to hold hearings later this year on the interrogation methods it describes.

continue reading at Time

By PAULINE JELINEK, Associated Press Writer

In a survey of U.S. troops in combat in Iraq, less than half of Marines and a little more than half of Army soldiers said they would report a member of their unit for killing or wounding an innocent civilian.

More than 40 percent support the idea of torture in some cases, and 10 percent reported personally abusing Iraqi civilians, the Pentagon said Friday in what it called its first ethics study of troops at the war front. Units exposed to the most combat were chosen for the study, officials said.

“It is disappointing,” said analyst John Pike of the Globalsecurity.org think tank. “But anybody who is surprised by it doesn’t understand war. … This is about combat stress.”

The military has seen a number of high-profile incidents of alleged abuse in the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan, including the killings of 24 civilians by Marines, the rape and killing of a 14-year-old girl and the slaying of her family and the sexual humiliation of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison.

“I don’t want to, for a minute, second-guess the behavior of any person in the military - look at the kind of moral dilemma you are putting people in,” Christopher Preble of the libertarian Cato Institute think tank, said of the mission in Iraq. “There’s a real tension between using too much force, which generally means using force to protect yourself, and using too little and therefore exposing yourself to greater risk.”

The overall study was the fourth in a series done by a special mental health advisory team since 2003 aimed at assessing the well-being of forces serving in Iraq.

read more at YAHOO!

Germany’s federal prosecutor announced she will not be proceeding with an investigation against former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, former CIA Director George Tenet, and other high-ranking U.S. officials for torture and other war crimes committed in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantánamo, according to a press release obtained by RAW STORY.

“The 400-page complaint was filed on November 14, 2006, by Berlin attorney Wolfgang Kaleck on behalf of the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH), the Republican Attorneys’ Association (RAV), more than 40 other international and national human rights groups, 12 Iraqi citizens who were held in Abu Ghraib, and one Saudi citizen still held at Guantánamo,” the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) press release continues.

CCR president Michael Ratner told the Associated Press in a telephone call from New York, “If Germany is not willing to enforce their law we think other countries will be - we’re not going to leave a stone unturned.”

“It took 35 years to get (former Chilean dictator Gen. Augusto) Pinochet and it won’t take that long with the Rumsfeld case,” Ratner added. “I think everyone recognizes that high-level U.S. officials ran a torture program around the world.”

Read more and follow the links provided by RAW STORY

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Crossposted from The Atlantic Online:

Alex Gibney’s new documentary on the legalization and authorization of torture by the Bush administration debuts this weekend at the Tribeca Film Festival. See the trailer here. It’s a well-crafted piece of work and a devastating exposure of the denial that still runs rampant in some quarters about what has actually been done in the name of the American people these past few years. Longtime readers of this blog know all too well many of the details - but this film does what a parasitic blog cannot, and what even all the innovative reporting on the subject has not yet been able to do. It puts it all together. It represents a moment in this war when we can actually stop and look back from rising ground, and see how far we have come from the civilized norms of warfare that the United States represented in the last century. Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld tore off that civilized veneer and repudiated that long and honorable history. From the details of approved interrogation techniques replicated by scapegoats at Abu Ghraib to the self-conscious attempts to dissemble and deceive about the Rubicon we’ve crossed to the simple facts of the percentage of captives at Gitmo who were actually seized by U.S. forces - a small fraction of the total - you see conscious, orchestrated sadism at work. It’s a film that enrages and shocks. But it has all been in front of our noses.

I watched the whole thing intently and quietly to the end. But its final coda contains a small clip of Gibney’s late father, a longtime military interrogator, and his views on what has been done to his honorable profession by the Bush White House. Alone, it made me weep. It struck a chord that still resonates: of one thing mainly, and one thing still unavoidably. Shame. Almost unspeakable shame.

(Full disclosure: Alex Gibney’s brother, James, is my colleague at the Atlantic and was once a colleague at The New Republic. Photo: a detainee cell at Abu Ghraib under president George W. Bush, commander-in-chief.)

By Sam Provance

Editor’s Note: Former Army Sgt. Sam Provance was one of the heroes of the Abu Ghraib scandal, the only uniformed military intelligence officer at the Iraqi prison to testify about the abuses during the internal Army investigation. When he recognized that the Pentagon was scapegoating low-level personnel, he also gave an interview to ABC News.

The Congress, which was then controlled by the Republicans, promised a fuller investigation. Provance submitted a sworn statement. But Congress never followed through, leaving Provance hanging out to dry. Then, in February 2007, he went to a special screening of the documentary, “Ghosts of Abu Ghraib,” and learned more than he expected about why the scandal died:

03/27/07 “Consortium News” For those of you who have not heard of me, I am Sam Provance. My career as an Army sergeant came to a premature end at age 32 after eight years of decorated service, because I refused to remain silent about Abu Ghraib, where I served for five months in 2004 at the height of the abuses.
A noncommissioned officer specializing in intelligence analysis, my job at Abu Ghraib was systems administrator (”the computer guy”). But I had the misfortune of being on the night shift, saw detainees dragged in for interrogation, heard the screams, and saw many of them dragged out. I was sent back to my parent unit in Germany shortly after the Army began the first of its many self-investigations.

In Germany, I had the surreal experience of being interrogated by one of the Army-General-Grand-Inquisitors, Major General George Fay, who showed himself singularly uninterested in what went on at Abu Ghraib.

I had to insist that he listen to my eyewitness account, whereupon he threatened punitive actions against me for not coming forward sooner and even tried to hold me personally responsible for the scandal itself.

The Army then demoted me, suspended my Top Secret clearance, and threatened me with ten years in a military prison if I asked for a court martial. I was even given a gag order, the only one I know to have been issued to those whom Gen. Fay interviewed.

But the fact that most Americans know nothing of what I saw at Abu Ghraib, and that my career became collateral damage, so to speak, has nothing to do with the gag order, which turned out to be the straw that broke this sergeant’s back.

After seeing first-hand that the investigation wasn’t going to go anywhere and that no one else I knew from the intelligence community was being candid, I allowed myself to be interviewed by American and German journalists. Sadly, you would have had to know German to learn the details of what I had to say at that time about the abuses at Abu Ghraib.

Continue reading at Information Clearing House

H/T Patriot for this post. His comments:

I detest and that is a mild way to describe my feelings about Lindsay Graham. When I came back from Viet-Nam in Jan 68 I still had 10 months to do in the Army. As a demo man, combat engineer they decided that I would be a good stockade guard ? The people that I was expected to guard were mainly people who had gone AWOL. I was expected to feel hard toward these guys for having the intelligence and initiative to think for themselves. I saw much abuse of individuals whenever the asshole guards could isolate the prisoners. One of the people that I worked with was the person who went into a church in Boston and dragged an AWOL man out who was claiming sanctuary. He was very proud of that. Lindsay Graham is one of the worst people that I know of. He must be one of Mitch McConnells buddies.