General Disorder

Kevin Drum discusses the sickening new pictures in The Washington Post as well as an interview with Sy Hersh in which he mentions the strange choice of General Miller to “clean up” the abuses as Abu Ghraib:

“HERSH: No, look, I don’t want to ruin your evening, but the fact of the matter is it was the third investigation. There had been two other investigations.

One of them was done by a major general who was involved in Guantanamo, General Miller. And it’s very classified, but I can tell you that he was recommending exactly doing the kind of things that happened in that prison, basically. He wanted to cut the lines. He wanted to put the military intelligence in control of the prison.”

Just as reminder, I posted about this a few days ago:

“One of the five Britons recently returned to the UK from Guantanamo Bay has claimed that he was subjected to cruel and sadistic treatment by US authorities.

Jamal al Harith, from Manchester, told the Daily Mirror today that detainees of Camp X-Ray and Camp Delta had to face frequent beatings, prolonged periods of isolation and traumatic psychological torture.

The 37-year-old was held at Guantanamo Bay for just over two years after coalition forces brought about the fall of the Taleban regime in Afghanistan. The divorced father-of-three said that the behaviour of prison guards was a deliberate affront to Islam and exacted to offend and terrorise the detainees.

Jamal told the Daily Mirror: ‘The whole point of Guantanamo was to get to you psychologically. The beatings were not as nearly as bad as the psychological torture – bruises heal after a week – but the other stuff stays with you.’

Mr al Harith said that religious practises were often disrupted or even banned in order to punish and antagonise prisoners.

The most extreme of these claims centres around how guards would bring prostitutes into the camp to pose naked in front of prisoners, who were used to veiled women, and counter to Islamic practice.

He said: ‘It was a profoundly disturbing experience for these men. They would refuse to speak about what had happened. It would take perhaps four weeks for them to tell a friend – and we would shout it out around the whole block”

If there is even a modicum of truth to this, the choice of Miller to head up the prisons in Iraq after the torture debacle is so completely insane that it may be the straw that breaks Rummy’s back.

Josh Marshall has more — according to the Taguba report there is good reason to believe this is true.

And, Newsday reported just today that:

Promising a broader investigation, the U.S. military acknowledged Wednesday that two guards at the U.S. prison camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, had been disciplined over allegations of prisoner abuse.

[…]

Military officials were still investigating the three cases, which had not been submitted to a court, and whether any other complaints of prisoner abuse had been made.

The revelations came as Guantanamo’s former commander, Army Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, apologized Wednesday for the “illegal or unauthorized acts” committed by U.S. soldiers at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison. Photographs showed Iraqi prisoners being abused by smiling American guards at the notorious Saddam Hussein-era prison.

Miller has taken charge of U.S. prisons in Iraq. He was the commander of Guantanamo from October 2002 to March 2004 and has said he was able to increase the amount of valuable intelligence tips gleaned from detainees during interrogations.

The hard-nosed general attributed the success to a system of rewards given to detainees and said officials were working to make the detainees’ incarceration more comfortable.

[…]

Criticism from human rights groups lessened when the detainees were moved into their permanent cells but spiked again after a rash of suicide attempts. There have been at least 34 suicide attempts since the mission began in January 2001.

Marshall points out the differences between Gitmo and its allegedly hardened terrorists and the average Joes who are being “liberated” indefinitely in Iraqi prisons, but the wanton disregard for any kind of rule of law in the WOT is the root cause of all these problems. General Hard Nose is the last guy who should be anywhere near a prison right now.

And, just to end the day on an up note, Hersh also had this to say on O’Reilly:

I can tell you just from the phone calls I’ve had in the last 24 hours, even more, there are other photos out there. There are many more photos even inside that unit. There are videotapes of stuff that you wouldn’t want to mention on national television that was done. There was a lot of problems.

There was a special women’s section. There were young boys in there. There were things done to young boys that were videotaped. It’s much worse. And the Maj. Gen. Taguba was very tough about it. He said this place was riddled with violent, awful actions against prisoners.

Jesus.