The latest Pentagon report on torture says there are new rules defining how the U.S. military
should treat captives. But as a New York Times editorial, “Abu Ghraib, Whitewashed Again” pointed out yesterday,
“Don’t ask what they are, because they’re classified.” And certainly don’t ask the Navy inspector
general who wrote the report that approved of the new rules. He admitted that, well, he had
not actually read them. Sometimes, as I’ve noted before, the official voice of the Times beats
with the heart of a fed-up blogger. Yesterday’s example:
This whitewash is typical of the reports issued by the Bush administration on
the abuse, humiliation and torture of prisoners at camps run by the military and the Central
Intelligence Agency. Like the others, [this] report concludes that only the lowest-ranking soldiers
are to be held accountable, not their commanders or their civilian overseers. …
[It] said that “none of the pictured abuses at Abu Ghraib
bear any resemblance to approved policies at any level, in any theater.” [The author] and his
investigators must have missed the pictures of prisoners in hoods, forced into stress positions and
threatened by dogs. All of those techniques were approved at one time or another by military
officials, including Mr. Rumsfeld. Of course, no known Pentagon policy orders the sexual
humiliation of prisoners. But that has happened so pervasively that it clearly was not just the
perverted antics of one night shift in one cellblock at Abu Ghraib.
The author of the report also must have missed what Douglas Jehl recounts today: “Army
Details Scale of Abuse of Prisoners in an Afghan Jail,” a front-page news
story based on American military documents obtained by Human Rights Watch:
WASHINGTON — Two Afghan prisoners who died in American custody in
Afghanistan in December 2002 were chained to the ceiling, kicked and beaten by American
soldiers in sustained assaults that caused their deaths, according to Army criminal investigative
reports that have not yet been made public. …
John Sifton, a researcher on Afghanistan for Human Rights Watch, said the documents
substantiated the group’s own investigations showing that beatings and stress positions were
widely used, and that “far from a few isolated cases, abuse at sites in Afghanistan was common in
2002, the rule more than the exception.”
Whoops. Seems the author of the Pentagon report has seen those documents after all. It’s just
that the torture (sorry, he termed it “abuse”) that killed those two prisoners “was unrelated to
approved interrogation techniques” (his words).
But the documents say four military interrogaters assaulted the two prisoners with “kicks to
the groin and leg, shoving or slamming … into walls/table … painful, contorted body positions
during interview and forcing water into [one’s] mouth until he could not breathe.” When the two
died, Jehl also reports, U.S. military officials said their deaths “were from natural causes.” The
American commander of allied forces in Afghanistan even “denied that prisoners had been chained
to the ceiling” or that their lives had been endangered by their treatment. After a Times
investigation, however, “the Army acknowledged that the deaths were homicides.”
Everything is A-OK now, though, because of the new rules. The Pentagon says the rules are
fine, if secret, and we can take the Pentagon’s word for it because this is a democracy.
