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• Monday, December 1, 2008 08:26 AM

  Regarding "from the top", "enhanced interrogation techniques" were brought to Iraq

  by Miller when he likewise moved from managing Gitmo to Iraqi security -

  aclu doj pdf: http://www.aclu.org/torturefoia/search/searchdetail.php?r=2902&q=

  link to sy hersh new yorker may 2004 on my name ...

  imho -- it's important to remember that this mistreatment/torture occurred on a closed unit, with prisoners who had already been thoroughly disarmed and "normally" brutalized during processing before they were deemd "high value" prisoners ... many had endured Geneva convention bending or breaking brutalization and humiliation ...

  Graner and his "team" were not interrogating these people ... they were simply "softening them up" (brutalizing them both in the time-honored fashion of, say, the prisons of the American South, Saddam Hussein or Augusto Pinchocet, and in amateurish home-grown, maximum humiliation recorded on digital-camera ways).

  The members of Graner's team were untrained to be "guards", irrc, they were trained for materiel transport and traffic control ... they were pressed into what should have been basic baby-sitting of a unit of high-value detainees and transporting them back and forth to the interrogation unit ... Military Intelligence should not have been giving them orders (and apparently there were no orders, just suggestions, just praise ...) Karpinski was told to mind her own business ...

  As Hersh said early on, the entire chain of command failed the grunts at the bottom rung ... however, Graner was top-dog, mentor, trainer and cheerleader ...

  that he tries to equate his actions with that of the others is disturbing

  —susan sunflower Read susan sunflower's other letters
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