Today's NY Times covers a unit dedicated to torturing prisoners captured by American forces. As we learned from other diaries, Special Operations Forces are being distributed among US Embassies around the world, supplanting or replacing CIA ("civilian" operatives, more or less) with Cheney/Rumsfeld-style military rough guys.
In Iraq, the NY Times article shows, torture was not just "a few bad apples", but a permitted and encouraged affair:
As the Iraqi insurgency intensified in early 2004, an elite Special Operations forces unit converted one of Saddam Hussein's former military bases near Baghdad into a top-secret detention center. There, American soldiers made one of the former Iraqi government's torture chambers into their own interrogation cell. They named it the Black Room.
In the windowless, jet-black garage-size room, some soldiers beat prisoners with rifle butts, yelled and spit in their faces and, in a nearby area, used detainees for target practice in a game of jailer paintball. Their intention was to extract information to help hunt down Iraq's most-wanted terrorist, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, according to Defense Department personnel who served with the unit or were briefed on its operations.
The Black Room. An apt name for the global black eye that George Bush has given our nation with his policies.
The Black Room was part of a temporary detention site at Camp Nama, the secret headquarters of a shadowy military unit known as Task Force 6-26. Located at Baghdad International Airport, the camp was the first stop for many insurgents on their way to the Abu Ghraib prison a few miles away.
How rough did our shadowy forces get?
Hard for your commanding officer to miss those, huh?
Placards posted by soldiers at the detention area advised, "NO BLOOD, NO FOUL." The slogan, as one Defense Department official explained, reflected an adage adopted by Task Force 6-26: "If you don't make them bleed, they can't prosecute for it."
In violation of international law, in violation of the Geneva Conventions, this unit's operations proves that Abu Gharib was no "abberation" but rather the policy of the Pentagon:
...
"The reality is, there were no rules there," another Pentagon official said.
...
The new account reveals the extent to which the unit members mistreated prisoners months before and after the photographs of abuse from Abu Ghraib were made public in April 2004, and it helps belie the original Pentagon assertions that abuse was confined to a small number of rogue reservists at Abu Ghraib.
The abuses at Camp Nama continued despite warnings beginning in August 2003 from an Army investigator and American intelligence and law enforcement officials in Iraq. The C.I.A. was concerned enough to bar its personnel from Camp Nama that August.
Read the entire article at the New York Times, before it disappears in a week behind their Pay to Read site: LINK
What type of abuses went on there?
In January 2004, the task force captured the son of one of Mr. Hussein's bodyguards in Tikrit. The man told Army investigators that he was forced to strip and that he was punched in the spine until he fainted, put in front of an air-conditioner while cold water was poured on him and kicked in the stomach until he vomited. Army investigators were forced to close their inquiry in June 2005 after they said 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.
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On June 25, 2004, nearly two months after the disclosure of the abuses at Abu Ghraib, an F.B.I. agent in Iraq sent an e-mail message to his superiors in Washington, warning that a detainee captured by Task Force 6-26 had suspicious burn marks on his body. The detainee said he had been tortured. ...
American generals were also alerted to the problem. In December 2003, Col. Stuart A. Herrington, a retired Army intelligence officer, warned in a confidential memo that medical personnel reported that prisoners seized by the unit, then known as Task Force 121, had injuries consistent with beatings. "It seems clear that TF 121 needs to be reined in with respect to its treatment of detainees," Colonel Herrington concluded.
And what happened to those prisoners believed "innocent":
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. Prisoners deemed no threat to American troops were often driven deep into the Iraqi desert at night and released, sometimes given $100 or more in American money for their trouble.
Nice comfort - they were released "deep in the desert"... and how many lived through the walk back?
The revelations continue to leak out. There are decent people in government and in the military that are disgusted by the way Rumsfeld runs the Pentagon and the way that Cheney runs everything. Shining the light of truth on these cockroaches makes them skitter and skatter, but they'll eventually be tripped up, tangled in their own enthusiasm for evil.
Just to make the record clear: The Pentagon, run by Rumsfeld and encouraged by Cheney's "above the law" theories, participated on officially sanctioned and endorsed torture:
Back at Camp Nama, the task force leaders established a ritual for departing personnel who did a good job, Pentagon officials said. The commanders left them with two unusual mementos: a detainee hood and a souvenir piece of tile from the medical screening room that once held Mr. Hussein.
Officially sanctioned torture, endorsed up the chain of command. How can there be any doubt when these widespread incidents continue to be revealed? All those units, in all those places, "accidentally" going "a bit" too far? Not likely.
And yet, who has been prosecuted? Only the lowest of the low enlisted personnel. I have no sympathy for those found guilty of abuses at Abu Gharib. But they sure as hell were scapegoated so their commanders could be allowed to walk.