An explosive, in-depth
New York Times investigative piece today reports on a Special Operations team known as Task Force 6-26, described as a "melting pot" of military and civilian units, assigned one singular goal: capturing Zarqawi. To that end, the unit took over one of Hussein's former torture rooms, turned it into an interrogation cell known as "the Black Room," and proceeded to abuse and mistreat prisoners - both before and after the Abu Ghraib photos surfaced.
From the Times:
The veil of secrecy surrounding the highly classified unit has helped to shield its conduct from public scrutiny. The Pentagon will not disclose the unit's precise size, the names of its commanders, its operating bases or specific missions. Even the task force's name changes regularly to confuse adversaries, and the courts-martial and other disciplinary proceedings have not identified the soldiers in public announcements as task force members.
...
Despite the task force's access to a wide range of intelligence, its raids were often dry holes, yielding little if any intelligence and alienating ordinary Iraqis, Defense Department personnel said.
The Times asserts the investigation "helps belie the original Pentagon assertions that abuse was confined to a small number of rogue reservists at Abu Ghraib."
Several inquiries into the unit were begun; a few "bad apples" faced minor charges and transfers. But investigators were stymied, according to the Times, by the fact that "task force members used battlefield pseudonyms that made it impossible to identify and locate the soldiers involved. The unit also asserted that 70 percent of its computer files had been lost."
Many anonymous sources from different agencies contributed to the story, and it's one hell of a sobering and scary read. Go forth and read.
It is clearly way past time for real oversight and investigation to begin, particularly since it appears that very little useful information has been gleaned from these appalling tactics. It's going to be tough to stonewall after this account - the Times (finally) gets back in the game in a big way.