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Thread of Abuse Runs to the Oval Office
(Robert Scheer, Los Angeles Times, May 11, 2004)
Someone's lying — big-time — and neither Congress nor the media have begun to scratch the surface. Clearly we now know enough to stipulate that the several low-ranking alleged sadists charged in the Iraq torture scandal did not control the wing of the prison in which they openly and proudly did the devil's work. . . . The Red Cross complaint — and a follow-up report that was made available to the administration in February and obtained by the Wall Street Journal this week — raises the sobering possibility that these low-level members of the military police in Iraq may be right in claiming that they were just following orders of their superiors. . . . Upon witnessing such cases, the [Red Cross] interrupted its visits and requested an explanation from the authorities. The military intelligence officer in charge of interrogation explained that this practice was 'part of the process.' " The report said that what Red Cross representatives saw "went beyond exceptional cases" and was "in some cases tantamount to torture." . . . The Red Cross complained directly to the authorities at that time, two months before the now-infamous photographs were taken. . . . The White House and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld have for months stubbornly ignored and kept from the public the conclusions of both the Red Cross report and the even more damning internal report done by Army Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba for the Pentagon in March. . . . On Monday, President Bush reiterated his unyielding support for Rumsfeld, even as the influential Army Times newspaper called for heads to roll "even if that means relieving top leaders from duty in a time of war." The abuses of Iraqi prisoners in Baghdad are "a failure that ran straight to the top," argued the newspaper. . . . And all of this does flow from the top. With the occupation itself built on a web of lies — that invading Iraq was part of the war on terror, that Iraq had threatening weapons of mass destruction, that anybody who resisted the occupation was a "terrorist" or "thug" — it can only be assumed that those interrogators dealing with the nearly 50,000 Iraqi detainees in the last year were under enormous pressure to produce statements that fit these phony "facts." . . . The big lie that the United States is merely a selfless battler against terrorists, with no other agendas, opens the door for brutality against any who dare resist. Bush has exercised an arrogance unmatched by any U.S. president in a century and brandished God's will as his carte blanche. His unilateral, preemptive "nation-building" — and the settling of old scores in the name of fighting terror — grants license to treat anybody, including U.S. citizens, in a barbaric manner that cavalierly sweeps aside all standards of due process.

posted by LoZo 8:24 AM