A Pleasant Musical Interlude

Haydn String Quartet op. 76/6 in E-flat (movement 1/4)

New York Times Joins Chorus for Torture Prosecutions

We can understand that Americans may be eager to put these dark chapters behind them, but it would be irresponsible for the nation and a new administration to ignore what has happened — and may still be happening in secret C.I.A. prisons that are not covered by the military’s current ban on activities like waterboarding.

A prosecutor should be appointed to consider criminal charges against top officials at the Pentagon and others involved in planning the abuse.

In an editorial today, The New York Times has joined with bloggers and the ACLU demanding that a prosecutor be appointed to determine charges against top Bush and Pentagon officials. They don't say if this should be from within the Justice Department or an independent prosecutor, though they do call for "an independent panel" to look further into the facts behind Bush's torture gulag.

Of course, for the cynical NYT, at the same time they call for prosecutions, they admit they don't believe Obama, with so much on his plate, will actually act upon their call: "we do not hold out real hope that Barack Obama, as president, will take such a politically fraught step."

Well, it's progress of a sort if the NYT believes that to be politically correct they must call for prosecutions. The crimes adumbrated in even the declassified portions of the Levin/McCain report are too telling. Something must be done, even from the standpoint of the Establishment.

While all the NYT has in mind is prattling, their call shows that public clamor is growing. We must not let the Times brand of cynicism derail this movement. Write your Congressperson and demand that George W. Bush and his administration and Pentagon cronies answer legally for the crimes against humanity they have committed.

An aside: the NYT also continue to push their silly story that the torture techniques taught at Guantanamo by the SERE psychologists were "based on illegal tortures devised by Chinese agents during the Korean War." Even the Senate report has backed down from the characterization and said SERE techniques were devised from Chinese "agents" only "in part." If you're trying to whip up racist hatred and political fear towards an adversary, like China, the truth is an important weapon.

For more information on where U.S. torture really originated, read my history of the subject: Nuts & Bolts -- How U.S. Organized Torture Program.

For the NYT editorial, H/T to Glenn Greenwald

Scott Horton has his own blog piece on the editorial, but he focuses on the pathetic coverage of the Senate investigations and report by the NYT.

Rachel Maddow Presses Carl Levin on Torture Indictments

Watch the clip and see what you think Sen. Levin is saying. My interpretation is that he will send all the material he and the Senate Armed Services Committee have gathered on the Bush administration's organization of torture and send it to incoming President Obama's Justice Department for possible prosecutions. In addition, Sen. Levin calls for an independent commission, with subpoena power, to investigate the role of the CIA, which remains obscure and mostly unexamined.

Pressed by Maddow, Sen. Levin said that the country to see what is revealed in such an investigation and let the issue of possible indictments flow from that.

Kudos to Rachel Maddow, the newest addition to the cable punditry set, who gave prominent time to the discussion of the SASC's recently released report on detainee abuse, and on the subject of possible prosecutions arising from the material in that document. Levin, as possibly befits someone in his position, was cagey, but I can't see much wrong with what he proposes.

The main question is what kind of politics and justice will flow out of the "change" administration of Barack Obama? Reading the tea leaves will make you dizzy, veering now to the right, and then back to the center -- rarely to the left.

I look forward to the upcoming battles. At least the issue is out there. Let's push it for all it's worth!

H/T to Scott Horton, who you should be reading everyday anyway!

Now They're Getting It: Andrew Sullivan Discovers Earlier Torture Timeline

Bloggers everywhere are getting everything they can squeeze out of Vice President Dick Cheney's interview with ABC television the other day. It's full of gems like the following from the America's own dark prince:

And I think those who allege that we've been involved in torture, or that somehow we violated the Constitution or laws with the terrorist surveillance program, simply don't know what they're talking about.

It's clear to even the often obtuse mainstream media that Cheney has essentially admitted in the interview to ordering torture.

"I was aware of the program, certainly, and involved in helping get the process cleared," Cheney said...

You just want to spit in the man's face, throw a shoe at his head, or bring him up on several felony charges.

Andrew Sullivan's latest blog entry at The Atlantic, notes the legal vulnerability of the Bush/Cheney team in words this writer finds strangely familiar. Referencing the Senate report on detainee treatment, the declassified version of which was released last week, Sullivan writes:

The decision to torture individuals was made by Bush and Cheney before the CIA ever asked for legal cover for the torture they had been ordered to commit. The torture and abuse was planned before even the January 2002 presidential memo that authorized torture:

In December 2001, more than a month before the President signed his memorandum, the Department of Defense (DoD) General Counsel’s Office had already solicited information on detainee “exploitation” from the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency (JPRA), an agency whose expertise was in training American personnel to withstand interrogation techniques considered illegal under the Geneva Conventions.

It is important and gratifying to see the bigger names in the blogosphere pick up the import of the earlier torture timeline, and the legal exposure it brings to the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld/CIA band of outlaw brothers. Gratifying in part because I noticed this last summer, and needled the Senate committee and the press in general about it:

Now something is very strange here, as Levin's own staff appear to have documents indicating DoD was asking about SERE techniques in December 2001, eight months before the July 2002 request everyone else is concentrating on. Why this gap? My guess is that it would take us even closer to the Oval Office than Levin or anyone else wants to go at this point. Where are these documents on the December 2001 request? Why did no one on the committee question Baumgartner about this issue during the hearings?

With the publicity coming from the likes of Andrew Sullivan, and the announced campaign by the ACLU to call for an independent prosecutor to look into this earlier timeline issue, along with the other crimes of the administration on torture and interrogation, can it be too much to hope that this revelation is building to a tipping point, compelling action by the incoming Obama team, or by the supine Congress? While other mainstream liberal bloggers, like Glenn Greenwald in his latest post, have failed to notice the earlier timeline and its significance, some of his main commenters at Salon.com have added the Dec. 2001 JPRA approach to their official timeline webpages.

So far, Sullivan's adherence to the earlier timeline narrative, and the illegal plot it describes, is the best news yet that this scandal will grow only bigger, and with it the calls for prosecution of officials at the highest level of government.

Here's how we could start: DoD's approach to JPRA in December 2001, seeking information on reverse-engineering abusive "exploitation" interrogation techniques is prosecutable at least, one would think, under the Conspiracy section of 18 USC 2430:

(a) Offense.— Whoever outside the United States commits or attempts to commit torture shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both, and if death results to any person from conduct prohibited by this subsection, shall be punished by death or imprisoned for any term of years or for life.
(b) Jurisdiction.— There is jurisdiction over the activity prohibited in subsection (a) if—
(1) the alleged offender is a national of the United States; or
(2) the alleged offender is present in the United States, irrespective of the nationality of the victim or alleged offender.
(c) Conspiracy.— A person who conspires to commit an offense under this section shall be subject to the same penalties (other than the penalty of death) as the penalties prescribed for the offense, the commission of which was the object of the conspiracy.

The Senate report gives us the evidence. We've got them cold now. The approach to JPRA was conspriacy to commit torture, and a clear violation of the torture statute. Why can't we begin the prosecutions based on this? Why can't we start now?

U.S.-Iraq: Release Muntadar al-Zaidi!

When Iraqi TV reporter Muntadar al-Zaidi stood up the other day and cursed Bush and threw his shoes, sharply, at the U.S. Commander-in-Chief (as Bush likes to reference himself) and his puppet Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki, Iraqis and much of the Arab world thrilled to see someone challenge power directly to its face.

Sadly, this protest against the imperialist destruction of his country and deaths of over a million due to the American invasion will not transcend the symbolic. But meanwhile, news is filtering out, and now confirmed by the BBC, that Mr. al-Zaidi is being tortured while held in U.S. custody at Camp Cropper. He is reportedly being charged with assault against the Iraqi Prime Minister.

From the BBC report:

Muntadar al-Zaidi has allegedly suffered a broken arm, broken ribs and internal bleeding, his older brother, Dargham, told the BBC.

Mr Zaidi threw his shoes at Mr Bush at a news conference, calling him "a dog".

A spokesperson for the Iraqi military says the journalist is in good health and said the allegations were untrue....

Our correspondent says that the previously little-known journalist from the private Cairo-based al-Baghdadia TV has become a hero to many, not just in Iraq but across the Arab world, for what many saw as a fitting send-off for a deeply unpopular US president.

As he flung the shoes, Mr Zaidi shouted: "This is a goodbye kiss from the Iraqi people, dog"....

Mr Zaidi has previously been abducted by insurgents and held twice for questioning by US forces in Iraq.

In November 2007 he was kidnapped by a gang on his way to work in central Baghdad and released three days later without a ransom.

He said at the time that the kidnappers had beaten him until he lost consciousness, and used his necktie to blindfold him.

Mr Zaidi never learned the identity of his kidnappers, who questioned him about his work before letting him go.

The disgust with which millions in the world hold the aggressor Bush, who faked evidence for a war in Iraq, and then invaded the country, with the connivance of both political parties in the United States, and then proceeded to occupy the country by force, and torture thousands of its citizens, this disgust found its symbol in Muntadar's impulsive demonstration.

Whatever "crime" Muntadar has committed pales next to the crimes of Bush and the U.S. military in Iraq. Muntadar should be freed immediately, and if he was mistreated in custody, his abusers should be charged. The fact this will never happen only points out to the thousands of Arabs protesting in the streets the lie behind the pretense of "progress" in the Middle East. By "progress", the U.S. government means progress in mollifying its own population that things will get better, that the U.S. will withdraw... some day. (Even as the government sets certain dates, the generals "on the ground" are already denying any such withdrawal.)

Whoever is holding Muntadar al-Zaidi, in the name of justice, release him!

Scott Horton on the Still Classified Portions of Senate Report

Scott Horton, whose access to Washington insiders is astronomically greater than my own, looked at the new Levin/McCain report on U.S. Detainee Treatment, and offers some insight into what is not in the report. For one thing, this report contains only declassified material. According to Horton, "the full report is filled with classified information and therefore has been submitted to the Department of Defense with a request that the materials be declassified for release."

Horton maintains that the classified version of the report contains yet further "bombshells" about the reverse-engineering of SERE torture techniques.

And deep in its classified hold, the report looks into the use of psychotropic drugs which were, with Donald Rumsfeld’s approval, routinely administered to prisoners in order to facilitate their interrogation—in violation of international agreements and American criminal law.

It will be very interesting to get this formerly classified information into public hands, but the use of psychotropic drugs on prisoners has been previously revealed, and in fact has a long history, especially as researched and operationalized by the CIA. These are matters of written history.

Horton's article also includes a few vital points necessary for putting the Senate's report into context:

The report, even in its still-classified form, does not tell the whole story of what happened. It does not address the program administered by the CIA. And even with respect to the Department of Defense, the Committee and its investigators were effectively stonewalled by the United States Special Operations Command and its overlords in the Pentagon who failed to provide information about special rules of engagement introduced with the authority of Undersecretary of Defense Stephen Cambone that authorized the torture and mistreatment of prisoners held for intelligence interrogation in operations dating back to the earliest weeks of the “war on terror.”

If you know more, Scott, please tell us. A Google search on "special rules of engagement in Afghanistan" brought up almost nothing.

It is supposedly a truism that in Washington access to knowledge is akin to access to power. How much is being kept from the American people? How can anyone not believe that whatever has been revealed thus far is nothing more than the proverbial peak of an iceberg, and that under the surface of the surrounding waters lies an immense bulk of secrets and crimes, far greater than what we know or think we know?

This is what happens when you turn your government over to the secret forces of intelligence agencies and covert military programs. The breeding ground of such activities was World War II and the Korean War. It led to the genocidal war in Vietnam and Southeast Asia, and its tracks can be discerned in the death squads and disappearances and coups in Latin America, and throughout the Middle East, from Egypt to the steps of the Himalayas.

The fight to stop torture has a moral imperative all its own. But another important component of the fight is to reveal to the average citizen the true meaning and constitution of what the nation has become. It is almost impossible to believe, given how far the cancer has gone, that evils so entrenched can be extirpated sort of tremendously radical change. The forms of that change are yet obscure to us, as they lie in the future.

For us, the tasks now are to press for an end to the worst excesses, and press for a political action program without illusions.

Glenn Greenwald Calls for Independent Prosector for Torture Crimes

ACLU Calls for Independent Prosecutor After Senate Report on SERE Torture

I wish I'd seen this press release by the ACLU yesterday, because I would have incorporated it into my coverage of the release of the Senate Armed Services Committee Report -- an Inquiry into the Treatment of Detainees in U.S. Custody. This is especially so as the ACLU notes the same anomaly in the torture timeline that I do:

“The Senate Armed Services Committee’s conclusions confirmed what we have long known – the use of torture by the United States was not simply unrelated acts carried out by a few low-level officials, but rather a deliberate and systemic program established by our government’s highest ranking officials,” said Caroline Fredrickson, director of the ACLU Washington Legislative Office. “The ACLU applauds Chairman Levin and Ranking Member McCain for initiating this vital inquiry. The American people need to know if crimes were committed in the authorization and ordering of torture and abuse. Those individuals must be held responsible for the United States to be able to move forward and restore the rule of law"....

“The committee report makes clear the role of top White House and Defense Department officials in authorizing torture and abuse,” added Christopher Anders, ACLU Senior Legislative Counsel. “It also includes a startling new fact, which is that a top Defense Department official was inquiring into methods of torture and abuse more than a month before President Bush ordered that the Geneva Conventions would not apply to the detainees. There is now a whole new question that an independent prosecutor should investigate on whether the president’s order taking away Geneva Conventions protections was part of a scheme to engage in illegal torture that was already being explored.” [Emphasis added]

The inquiry by a top DoD official "more than a month" before Bush scrapped Geneva for this "war on terror" prisoners can only be Richard Shiffrin's approach to JPRA in December 2001.

From my coverage of the Senate Armed Services Committee hearings last September:

But the one document produced from the December 2001 contact -- a fax cover sheet from the Pentagon's Joint Personnel Recovery Agency (JPRA), sent from "Lt. Col. Dan Baumgartner" to "Mr. Richard Shiffrin," who worked for Haynes's in Rumsfeld's DoD General Council office -- introduces a theme of aggressive courting by JPRA/SERE personnel to take on the interrogations/exploitation task:

Mr. Shiffrin --
Here's our spin on exploitation. If you need experts to facilitate this process, we stand ready to assist. There are not many in DoD outside of JPRA that have the level of expertise we do in exploitation and how to resist it.

Really, my provenance on this issue goes back to last June, when I noticed something very odd in Baumgartner's statement to the committee:

While Senator Levin gives a fairly thorough presentation of how SERE techniques migrated to Guantanamo, including discussions and meetings and when they took place, and descriptions (at least in the documents released by the committee) of what kind of techniques were being taught, one date is inexplicably left out which Lt. Col. Baumgarten gave in his testimony. Levin concentrates upon the late July 2002 request by Richard Shiffrin, a Deputy General Counsel in the Department of Defense, for information on SERE techniques and their effects upon prisoners....

But Baumgartner's own opening statement gives a more nuanced, different story. From his statement, as published online (bold emphasis added):

My recollection of my first communication with OGC relative to techniques was with Mr. Richard Shiffrin in July 2002. However, during my two interviews with Committee staff members last year I was shown documents that indicated I had some communication with Mr. Shiffrin related to this matter in approximately December 2001. Although I do not specifically recall Mr. Shiffrin’s request to the JPRA for information in late 2001, my previous interviews with Committee staff members and review of documents connected with Mr. Shiffrin’s December 2001 request have confirmed to me the JPRA, at that time, provided Mr. Shiffrin information related to this Committee’s inquiry.

Now something is very strange here, as Levin's own staff appear to have documents indicating DoD was asking about SERE techniques in December 2001, eight months before the July 2002 request everyone else is concentrating on. Why this gap? My guess is that it would take us even closer to the Oval Office than Levin or anyone else wants to go at this point. Where are these documents on the December 2001 request? Why did no one on the committee question Baumgarten about this issue during the hearings?

But by the second round of committee hearings, Sen. Levin had put the December 2001 request back into the timeline. I'd like to think I had something to do with that, but who knows? Almost no other commenter, made this point at the time, despite my public criticism of the press and blog coverage, the one exception being a front page article by smintheus at Daily Kos. Later, I confronted Sen. Levin himself with these questions during a "live blog" at FDL (thanks EW!). In any case, the cat is officially out of the bag now, and the issue has been joined by the ACLU, with growing support from other organizations soon to follow, I expect.

I'm very heartened to see this important element of the torture timeline picked up at last by one of our premier legal human rights and civil liberties organizations. It gives me hope that there will be sufficient political will in the society to take on the tremendous task of prosecuting the criminals in the Bush Administration and the military/CIA who had the arrogance to believe they could engage in torture with impunity by gaming the system and twisting all concept of law.

We all should support the ACLU's call for an independent prosecutor to investigate and then bring the appropriate charges.

Bravo, ACLU!

Senate Report Nails Rumsfeld, Sets Up War Crimes Trial

They may not have meant to do it, but the Senate Armed Services' Committee released a report by Senators Carl Levin and John McCain that gives us the best timeline to date on administration decisions to begin torturing detainees. The report, an Inquiry into the Treatment of Detainees in U.S. Custody, also describes the means by which both the Pentagon and the CIA approached agencies within government, leading to the very top of the Bush Administration, and how the latter rushed in a series of presidential orders, and memos by the Office of Legal Counsel, to redefine torture law in order to provide legal cover for their blatant violation of the laws of war and those against torture.

The Washington Post article covering these developments, Report on Detainee Abuse Blames Top Bush Officials, is listed as the most viewed item of the day. And for good reason, for anyone who knows how to read such material can see the bombshell that resides within.

Those in the anti-torture community are fond of repeating the fact that torture is a jus cogens norm, that is:

"a norm accepted and recognized by the international community of States as a whole as a norm from which no derogation is permitted and which can be modified only by a subsequent norm of general international law having the same character." Link

But when it comes to the question of prosecuting Rumsfeld and others for the crime of torture, it's generally accepted (by the mainstream media and cable punditry) that the Bush Administration has created sufficient legal cover for themselves, and that we will have to look to international intervention, under the concept of universal jurisdiction, to prosecute these individuals.

But even by their own pathetic lights, the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld troika and their assistants failed to protect themselves, as their rush to cover their tracks came TWO MONTHS TOO LATE. They are still trying to keep certain documents secret, it seems, and we must demand they see the light of day, so we can proceed with the prosecutions. (By "we" I mean an Obama Justice Department.)

Here's the key paragraphs in the narrative of the report, at least when it comes to the most vulnerable part of their defense against prosecution. Keep in mind that Levin/McCain begin their narrative with the "Presidential Order [that] Opens the Door to Considering Aggressive Techniques."

On February 7, 2002, President Bush signed a memorandum stating that the Third Geneva Convention did not apply to the conflict with al Qaeda and concluding that Taliban detainees were not entitled to prisoner of war status or the legal protections afforded by the Third Geneva Convention. The President’s order closed off application of Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, which would have afforded minimum standards for humane treatment, to al Qaeda or Taliban detainees.

So, now they think they are covered against violations of the Geneva Convention. But they didn't think, or they forgot that they were seeking to break, or already breaking the Geneva Convention, and a host of other treaties and laws, at least as early as December 2001.

Again, from the report (emphasis added):

In December 2001, more than a month before the President signed his memorandum, the Department of Defense (DoD) General Counsel’s Office had already solicited information on detainee “exploitation” from the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency (JPRA), an agency whose expertise was in training American personnel to withstand interrogation techniques considered illegal under the Geneva Conventions.

JPRA runs the military's Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape, or SERE program, under which military personnel considered at risk of capture are "tortured" under controlled circumstances, with the aim of inoculating them against confessing or revealing secrets under pressure. The SERE program specialized in exposing its recruits to waterboarding, nudity, stress positions, degrading behavior, and sensory overload and sensory deprivation. It was slam everything but the kitchen sink against a person to make them break. During training there are doctors and psychologists around to keep these things from getting out of control. But some of these doctors or psychologists evidently thought they could use their knowledge of the program to "reverse-engineer" it and provide interrogation expertise to the military when asked.

And they were asked first in December 2001:

Given JPRA’s role and expertise, the request from the DoD General Counsel’s office was unusual. In fact, the Committee is not aware of any similar request prior to December 2001. But while it may have been the first, that was not the last time that a senior government official contacted JPRA for advice on using SERE methods offensively. In fact, the call from the DoD General Counsel’s office marked just the beginning of JPRA’s support of U.S. government interrogation efforts.

The subsequent contact between JPRA, SERE, SERE psychologists, the CIA, and Guantanamo personnel make up the bulk of the rest of the report, and is definitely worth pursuing, and very important in its own right. (In fact, I've written much on this previously during the Senate Committee hearings.) But right now I'm concentrating on the critical first approach.

After discussing the December 2001 contact between the Department of Defense and JPRA, the narrative jumps ahead to Spring 2002. The reason for the jump will soon be clear (emphasis added):

Beginning in the spring of 2002 and extending for the next two years, JPRA supported U.S. government efforts to interrogate detainees. During that same period, senior government officials solicited JPRA’s knowledge and its direct support for interrogations. While much of the information relating to JPRA’s offensive activities and the influence of SERE techniques on interrogation policies remains classified, unclassified information provides a window into the extent of those activities.

(U) JPRA’s Chief of Staff, Lieutenant Colonel Daniel Baumgartner testified that in late 2001 or early 2002, JPRA conducted briefings of Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) personnel on detainee resistance, techniques, and information on detainee exploitation.

(U) On April 16, 2002, Dr. Bruce Jessen, the senior SERE psychologist at JPRA, circulated a draft exploitation plan to JPRA Commander Colonel Randy Moulton and other senior officials at the agency. The contents of that plan remain classified but Dr. Jessen’s initiative is indicative of the interest of JPRA’s senior leadership in expanding the agency’s role.

We can quite clearly see the use of classification as a cover-up of culpability and probable war crimes. This is doubly true for the classification of any materials between December 2001 and February 7, 2002, the date of Bush's presidential order suspending Geneva rights, because ALL abuse and torture before that date has no cover that even the worst right-wing and pro-military wingnut could find a fig-leaf of bogus legal cover. And that's important because we don't want to win a formal argument about how international law covers Bush, Rumsfeld, et al.'s crimes, we want prosecutions, here, now, in this country. Frankly, I think there are more barriers to bringing charges abroad, for fear of confronting the United States, and we need to set an example for the world ourselves anyway, and try and undo the tremendous damage these individuals have done.

The report goes into succinct detail about the further descent into lawlessness by the administration, the military, and the CIA; how some fought back and tried to protest (military lawyers, CID investigators, etc.), but in the end the administration kept pushing their torture agenda, until the final paper reached Rumsfeld's desk:

With respect to GTMO’s October 11, 2002 request to use aggressive interrogation techniques, Mr. Haynes said that “there was a sense by the DoD Leadership that this decision was taking too long” and that Secretary Rumsfeld told his senior advisors “I need a recommendation.” On November 27, 2002, the Secretary got one. Notwithstanding the serious legal concerns raised by the military services, Mr. Haynes sent a one page memo to the Secretary, recommending that he approve all but three of the eighteen techniques in the GTMO request. Techniques such as stress positions, removal of clothing, use of phobias (such as fear of dogs), and deprivation of light and auditory stimuli were all recommended for approval....

(U) On December 2, 2002, Secretary Rumsfeld signed Mr. Haynes’s recommendation, adding a handwritten note that referred to limits proposed in the memo on the use of stress positions: “I stand for 8-10 hours a day. Why is standing limited to 4 hours?”

In the next days and weeks I suppose (and hope) a lot more will be written on this. I have aimed this essay at what I feel is a key revelation in the Senate committee's investigation and report, one that can and should lead to the filing of charges against Donald Rumsfeld, William Haynes, and a number of others. Whether Bush can be prosecuted for his actions as president I leave to the legal minds to ponder.

Oddly, in the conclusions section of the report, the authors leave out the December 2001 solicitation to JPRA and return to a timeline wherein JPRA was approached in July 2002 for information on SERE techniques:

That solicitation, prompted by requests from Department of Defense General Counsel William J. Haynes II, reflected the view that abusive tactics similar to those used by our enemies should be considered for use against detainees in U.S. custody.

I don't know why the Committee would bury in their conclusions an aspect of the timeline that was especially culpable for the administration. Perhaps they felt that with the classification of certain documents they didn't have enough facts to back up their contentions. In that case it is even more essential to call for a declassification of all documents on the torture timeline, and the incoming Obama administration should make this a first priority, if their claims to government transparency are going to carry any weight.

In any case, there's plenty more in the report to keep any war crimes tribunal busy, and also assist those in writing a true history of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. I will close with this statement by the committee shooting down the myth that the torture at Abu Ghraib was the result of bad training or a few "rotten apples":

The abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib in late 2003 was not simply the result of a few soldiers acting on their own. Interrogation techniques such as stripping detainees of their clothes, placing them in stress positions, and using military working dogs to intimidate them appeared in Iraq only after they had been approved for use in Afghanistan and at GTMO. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s December 2, 2002 authorization of aggressive interrogation techniques and subsequent interrogation policies and plans approved by senior military and civilian officials conveyed the message that physical pressures and degradation were appropriate treatment for detainees in U.S. military custody. What followed was an erosion in standards dictating that detainees be treated humanely.

No kidding!

Onwards to a prosecution of the war criminals and return to civilized norms in the United States.

Also posted at Daily Kos