The
Washington Post carries a story today about the trial of an Abu Ghriab dog handler who is on trial for intimidating/torturing/harassing (your choice) a detainee with a dog. For my money (which admittedly isn't much more than $0.02), there are two interesting aspects to this story, and they aren't the ones being played as the central ones (which is, basically, that the activities at Abu Ghraib were not just the work of low-level guards, but were authorized by those higher up, as if we didn't know).
The first is that, after months of not being able to extract any useful information from the suspect (almost certainly because he had none), "He was threatened with being sent to a Saudi or Israeli prison, and interrogators tried to scare him with the possibility of sending him to the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba." Not only did the interrogators know what the consequences of rendering a prisoner to Saudi Arabia or Israel was, they even used that fact to threaten the prisoner. Which means any claim that they were really sending prisoners to other countries for some other reason is an out-and-out lie. Likewise, they not only recognized that the torture at Guantanamo was even worse than the torture they were practicing at Abu Ghraib, they assumed that fact was so well known that it would intimidate a prisoner as well. Bush and Rumsfeld may not acknowledge the torture that was going on at Guantanamo, but the people doing their bidding at Abu Ghraib did, for all intents and purposes.
The second interesting fact is the very last sentence of the article: "Military officials in Baghdad said Ahsy was released from custody in October 2004 -- 10 months after his capture -- but declined to elaborate." Now that is one hell of a statement. This is a man who, according to him, was basically a car smuggler, but who was thought to be a "high-value" al Qaeda "target" and as a result was subject to intense interrogation/torture. Perhaps he was thought to be so when arrested, but it should be obvious that, since he was released after less than a year in prison, he was no such thing. So why does the Washington Post headline read "Detainee in Photo With Dog Was 'High-Value' Suspect" rather than "Detainee in Photo With Dog Was Thought to be 'High-Value' Suspect"? And how can they just drop a bombshell sentence like that in at the end of an article without any elaboration?
And, just as a side note to the significance of that rather critical fact being dropped on the reader in the very last paragraph, in the paper I read "in person," the San Jose Mercury News, "space limitations" (i.e., ad space vs. news space) led to that sentence being completely omitted from the article, so that the reader has no idea that this treatment was being meted out to what we can only assume was a completely innocent person (not that it would be justified even if he was an actual "high-value" suspect).
Reprinted from Left I on the News