Abu Ghraib outrage smells a lot like secret domestic surveillance

[Filius Nullius]

The current images on CNN and other network news outlets of Abu Ghraib prison and pictures of tortured Iraqi prisoners once again bring to mind abuses secretly sanctioned by the Bush Administration. These events were originally set in motion when the Administration clandestinely promulgated top-level executive orders and memoranda waiving, and even rescinding outright, the normative rules and conventions regarding the interrogation of enemy soldiers and combatants.

Phillip Carter is a former U.S. Army officer who now writes on national security issues for The Washington Monthly. His article in that periodical entitled, "The Road to Abu Ghraib: The biggest scandal of the Bush administration began at the top," may be found at http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2004/0411.carter.html">Road to Abu Ghraib. It is as relevant today as when it was written in 2004 and should be read (or re-read) by anyone interested in learning the details of this outrageous abuse of power.

In fact, Carter's article is even more germane today because of other recent events that may, at first blush, seem unrelated to the new photographs from Abu Ghraib. During the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings last week in which Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez was questioned about the Bush Administration's secret domestic surveillance program that ignores and directly violates the provisions of the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, we received yet another reminder that, for this Administration, their ends always justify any means they choose to attain them.

The complaints during the first day of those hearings of Senator Lindsey Graham, obviously one of the most conservative Republicans you are likely to find anywhere, about the inordinate difficulties that American military personnel are having in determining what rules to apply in interrogating prisoners is a very telling sign. Graham is a former JAG prosecutor/defense counsel and an Air Force Reserve colonel who was appointed several years ago to serve also as a military appellate judge on the Air Force Court of Criminal Appeals. He is obviously intensely familiar with the rules of combat and prisoner interrogation. To paraphrase the Carter article, this is about as close as you will get to seeing an American Senator/JAG lawyer/military judge shouting from the rooftops about the abuses that have occurred. See also the following excerpt from an exchange that occurred between Sen. Graham and General Taguba in a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing: http://lgraham.senate.gov/index.cfm?mode=speechpage&id=221868">Graham/Taguba. As Carter contended in his article:

But in his own investigation of the Abu Ghraib abuses, Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba reported that this extension of Gitmo tactics to Iraq had only exacerbated confusion about what the Geneva Conventions did and did not authorize, and where Geneva applied, to the point that intelligence officers and military lawyers could not define any recognizable lines between the two modes of interrogation. Under the circumstances, it was almost inevitable that the techniques authorized for Gitmo would migrate over to Abu Ghraib.

The fact that there is little or no extant paper trail of orders or memoranda showing how this disregard of the normal rules of warfare propagated down the chain of command simply shows how good the Administration and Pentagon are at covering their tracks. The American mainstream media have done an abysmal job of investigating this disgrace and should renew their efforts to trace this stain on America's honor back to its source in the upper echelons of the White House and Pentagon.