I really don't know what planet some people are living on. From the NY Times editorial today:

Yesterday, Senator John McCain eloquently warned that the administration must deal quickly and publicly with the investigation. "As Americans turned away from the Vietnam War, they may turn away from this one unless this issue is quickly resolved with full disclosure immediately," he said.

We strongly agree.

I'm hoping my local Knight-Ridder outlet will publish this, inspired by the Baghdad Buring posting I linked to elsewhere ...

If Americans consider the abuse, torture and killing
of Iraqi prisoners to be an aberation committed by a
few rogue MPs, you are fooling yourselves. Patriot
Act I, Patriot Act II (which is lying in wait for
another domestic crisis), Guantanamo, and Abu Ghraib
are cut from the same cloth. The disdain that Bush,
Ashcroft and Rumsfeld hold for the Geneva Convention
and US Constitution is deep, abiding and palpable.

Secondly, thanks America for getting worked up over
this prison porn scandal. I knew I could count on you
to get agitated as soon as genitals were involved.
But what about the thousands of innocent Iraqis cut
down in the cross fire of George W. Bush's utterly
pointless vanity war? I'm sure you've seen snippets
of video showing old men, women and children cut down
in a hail of bullets because they were caught in the
wrong place. Now multiply those images by a thousand.

Let's tally up the score: reconstructed palaces of
torture -- 1; dead civilians -- 10,000; links to al
Qaeda -- 0; weapons of mass destruction -- 0.

And just what sort of information did the interrogators hope to aquire that (they figured) necessitated this sort of "softening up"?
- steve 5-08-2004 10:58 pm

It should also be noted that there is now a congressional investigation into the investigation of acts commited at Abu Ghraib. Now really, is all of this necessary? All we have to do is ask Bush and he'll tell us that he has made no mistakes for which he needs to apologize. Every hard working family in the country that is paying about $1000 a year out of their pockets to kill Iraqis should wirte to their congresspersons now and tell them to end the investiagtion because Bush said he has made no mistakes.
- Aaron 5-08-2004 11:12 pm

Re: the "softening up"--that's what's most heinous about all this to me. If, as Seymour Hersh suggests, our gulag is designed to be a "confession mill," all this human suffering and twisted behavior is just to give military bureaucrats something to write up in their reports so it looks like they're working. Gullible Americans are paying through the nose for this foolishness.
- tom moody 5-08-2004 11:13 pm

I guess my point is that if finding WMD required such extreme "softening up" it seems to prove just how desparate these interrogators were at a fairly early stage to find anything that could justify the invasion.
- steve 5-10-2004 3:57 am

I've since read (maybe Hersh's new article?) that the prison torture escalated with the insurgency. The interrogations were to find and identify all these people who were shooting at US troops. That's not to say the desperate WMD hunt wasn't (isn't) continuing. Or that a lot of the "information" is garbage to pad someone's file.

A lot of Americans seem to think the torture started after the mercenaries were killed at Fallujah. Whatever helps you sleep at night, but the abuse started much earlier. As usual, the media isn't presenting a clear time line.

- tom moody 5-10-2004 4:21 am

You guys probably already read Jan Herman. I just found out about (her?him?) from Goodreads and I think (she?he?) rocks.

The International Committee of the Red Cross warned many high officials in the U.S. government last January and earlier that it had observed widespread abuse of Iraqi prisoners "tantamount to torture." The ICRC characterized this treatment not as the aberrant behavior of a few but "a pattern and a system," which, like the Army's own report by Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba, gives the lie to Army Chief of Staff Gen. Peter Schoomaker and his boss, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Richard Meyers.

"...the media isn't presenting a clear time line." ???? 5-09-2004

See front page story New York Times Sunday 5-09-2004.
"LATE OCTOBER- EARLY NOVEMBER The most serious abuses occur at Abu Ghraib"

By the way, how would you have found out about this unless "the media" (the mainstream print media no less) didn't expose it?
(The New Yorker 5-01-2004)

- anonymous (guest) 5-10-2004 8:15 am

"60 Minutes II" ran the story April 28. They had sat on the pictures for a couple of weeks, until it was obvious they were going to get out, and allowed Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt to spin them by saying: "Frankly, I think all of us are disappointed by the actions of the few.”

The headline on my copy of the 5-09-04 NY Times is: "In Abuse, a Portrayal of Ill-Prepared, Overwhelmed GIs."

- tom moody 5-10-2004 8:49 am

I've seen at least two timelines published in the past two days, but I don't think either were in the NYTimes. I'm not having any luck finding them but they're out there.
- steve 5-10-2004 8:52 am

They're running timelines, but I haven't seen one clearly establishing that the prison torture preceded the Fallujah revolt. Most of the timelines have been focused on the "when did Bush and Rumsfeld know?" issue. You can be sure the Iraqis knew their brethren were being tortured long before the American public found out.
- tom moody 5-10-2004 8:59 am

ABC News Timeline
- steve 5-10-2004 9:09 am

here's FOX's.
"2004 • Jan. 13: A Member of the 800th Military Police Brigade tells superiors about prison abuses, and Pentagon officials are informed. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld is told a day or so later. Shortly afterward, Rumsfeld tells Bush."
- steve 5-10-2004 9:15 am

Just for the record, my point wasn't that there weren't timelines. The Fox and ABC timelines don't put the prison events into the larger context of what was happening in Iraq. The mercenaries were killed in Fallujah Mar. 31, and the torture didn't come to light until a month later. How does the average Joe know that the former didn't "legimately" inspire the latter (instead of the reverse, which was likely the case)?
- tom moody 5-10-2004 9:27 am

Yeah, but the timelines (lame as they may be) do show that there were allegations of abuse (and that Rummy and Jr. knew about them) well before Fallujah Mar 31.
- steve 5-10-2004 9:37 am

The requests keep pouring in: "Lynn-die," "Lynn-die," "Lynn-die." Another 75-100 so far today. Truly, she is the Madonna, the Evita, the Aung San Suu Kyi of devil-women. Americans want to know: who would I be? Jessica Lynch, or Lynndie England? Would I laugh and point at that naked man's privates, or turn and walk away? I guess this rock stardom of evil is good if it keeps people focused on the Abu Ghraib torture. BushCo is desperately trying to get the spin back with some show trials, but the damn pictures keep coming out. That one with the dogs is just awful.
- tom moody 5-10-2004 8:28 pm

From MaxSpeak (not so wild about his imperative blog title, but this is pretty good):

If there's a lynch mob in formation, it's for the soldiers in the pictures. Assorted right-wingers are the lynch mob by damning any suggestion that the misdeeds originated anywhere above ground level. To some extent, they are abetted by faux left-wing anti-working class/anti-military prejudice.

[...]

So the correct line is straight-forward: investigate the brass, the CIA, the civilian DoD leadership, and the contractors. Any problems in those areas are much more important than the perverse behavior of some individuals on the front lines.

Support the troops, or support the command. The right choice is clear.

More on our upright media and the great job it does informing us. Seems 60 Minutes held onto the Abu Ghraib photos, at the military's request, until oral arguments were concluded in the Guantanamo cases before the Supreme Court. The government argued to the Justices that of course our military, beyond the scrutiny of the courts and the press, could be trusted to exercise self-restraint not to subject enemy combatants to torture. 8 hours after oral arguments ended, 60 Minutes ran the photos.

- tom moody 5-10-2004 10:02 pm

Stephen Colbert (TDS) did a nice analysis after an intro of Inhofe being outraged by the outrage. "The actions of a few rogue journalists do not represent the vast majority of the American media." What about "all the amazingly damaging things we haven't reported on. Who didn't uncover the flaws in our pre-war intelligence? Who gave a free pass on the Saddam-al Qaeda connection? Who dropped Afghanistan from the headlines at the whiff of this Iraqi snipe hunt? The United States press corps. That's who. Heck, we didn't even put this story on the front page. We tried to bury this on 60 Minutes II. Who's on that, Charlie Rose and Angela Landsbury?"
- mark 5-12-2004 9:11 am

Re: the issue of what the government was shaking the prisoners down for, exactly, Digby connected two dots suggesting "WMD intel" was the higher priority.

- tom moody 5-13-2004 4:16 am

i recall a number of people in the aftermath of the rumsfeld testimony suggesting the desire to ferret out wmd intel as a primary reason for the tactics employed. very likely but still largely beside the point, unless the point is to slog our way up the chain of command. ultimately, as we all know, this policy is set at the top.
- dave 5-13-2004 4:28 am

Maybe it's useful in terms of framing a counter-narrative to the government's. Instead of "Undertrained soldiers, lacking supervision, horse around with digital cameras" (Safire spewed this line, I think, today) it's "In the increasingly desperate search for WMDs to retroactively justify the war, Bush and his inner circle sent down edicts to squeeze all Iraqi detainees by any means necessary, including torture, sex and filming the events in order to further humiliate the prisoners."

- tom moody 5-13-2004 4:36 am

isnt that a counter-counter narrative? one of the attorneys for the accused (possibly the same guy that leaked the taguba report) pointed out exactly who the military intelligence guys in the one of the pictures from the initial batch. whether they were after wmd intel or info about saddams whereabouts or aggrieved iraqis seems secondary to the underlying attitudes which cultivated endorsed and enabled the horrid acts.
- dave 5-13-2004 5:28 am

Maybe you have more faith than I do that people will continue to see them as horrid after a deluge of Republican spin. Those fucking bastards dedicated partisans are relentless about making people think black is white (eg, Cheney's crack today about the press wanting more pictures for salacious reasons). Also, they're gonna rush these show trials precisely so the attorneys can't prove the "original narrative." The attorneys need discovery (which means no government obfuscation, stonewalling, and bullshit narratives--as if!) to prove the orders came from higher up. If the analogy is Watergate, the counter-counternarrative to "it's just a third rate burglary" needs to be floated and widely disseminated ASAP.
- tom moody 5-13-2004 6:06 am

"I don't think this administration is committed to democracy." That's Michael Berg talking (Globe and Mail), and it's excellent that he's saying this kind of thing, rather than "those godless heathens killed my son because they hate our freedom." This kind of potent soundbite might slow up the inevitable escalation/retaliation fervour.
- sally mckay 5-13-2004 6:25 am

Now the administration lawyers argue that the release of more mp torture pics would break the geneva convention, exposing prisoners to further public shame.
It's all about human rights again. HA!
- steve 5-13-2004 7:16 pm