Site Presented By
Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
......Rumsfeld, in his appearances before the Senate and the House Armed Services Committees on May 7th, claimed to have had no idea of the extensive abuse. “It breaks our hearts that in fact someone didn’t say, ‘Wait, look, this is terrible. We need to do something,’ ” Rumsfeld told the congressmen. “I wish we had known more, sooner, and been able to tell you more sooner, but we didn’t.”
Rumsfeld told the legislators that, when stories about the Taguba report appeared, “it was not yet in the Pentagon, to my knowledge.” As for the photographs, Rumsfeld told the senators, “I say no one in the Pentagon had seen them”; at the House hearing, he said, “I didn’t see them until last night at 7:30.” Asked specifically when he had been made aware of the photographs, Rumsfeld said:
There were rumors of photographs in a criminal prosecution chain back sometime after January 13th . . . I don’t remember precisely when, but sometime in that period of January, February, March. . . . The legal part of it was proceeding along fine. What wasn’t proceeding along fine is the fact that the President didn’t know, and you didn’t know, and I didn’t know.
“And, as a result, somebody just sent a secret report to the press, and there they are,” Rumsfeld said.
Taguba, watching the hearings, was appalled. He believed that Rumsfeld’s testimony was simply not true. “The photographs were available to him—if he wanted to see them,” Taguba said. Rumsfeld’s lack of knowledge was hard to credit. Taguba later wondered if perhaps Cambone had the photographs and kept them from Rumsfeld because he was reluctant to give his notoriously difficult boss bad news. But Taguba also recalled thinking, “Rumsfeld is very perceptive and has a mind like a steel trap. There’s no way he’s suffering from C.R.S.—Can’t Remember Shit. He’s trying to acquit himself, and a lot of people are lying to protect themselves.” It distressed Taguba that Rumsfeld was accompanied in his Senate and House appearances by senior military officers who concurred with his denials.
“The whole idea that Rumsfeld projects—‘We’re here to protect the nation from terrorism’—is an oxymoron,” Taguba said. “He and his aides have abused their offices and have no idea of the values and high standards that are expected of them. And they’ve dragged a lot of officers with them.”...
=3
Come on, Elephantman, use that law school education to give me give me some more of that squirmy weaseling you're so well known for around here.
So many expressions of merciless vindictiveness, so many desires for sheer punitive retribution, so much love of vengeance for vengeance's sake..."you reap what you sow"..."if you're going to dish it out you'd better be able to take it"..."karma is a bitch"..."he got what he payed for"..."no sympathy from me"..."he got exactly what he deserved"..."eye for an eye"...etc.
The question of "sympathy" is not over whether he deserved to be convicted and sent to prison in the first place. I don't think anyone (except maybe his deluded parents) disputes that. It concerns whether or not he was treated unfairly by receiving far harsher punishment than the other implicated grunts, and by the fact that none of his superiors or any CIA agents have faced criminal punishment for the abuses. I think just about everyone here would agree that many more people up and down the chain of command deserve to be locked up for what happened at Abu Ghraib (and Gitmo). The question of sympathy is also concerned with how he's being treated in prison and whether such arguably excessive, abusive treatment will make him even worse when he gets out than he was before! In such a context, reading such inhumane comments both sickens and angers me, especially considering that Salon purports to be a progressive website!
Don't you folks realize that attitudes such as yours are precisely why America has such an unjust and draconian criminal justice system and such a monstrously large and out of control prison-industrial complex in the first place? Don't you folks realize that such attitudes, taken to an extreme, are precisely why we even had to face the horror shows of Abu Ghraib and Gitmo to begin with? If fewer people in this country held attitudes of callous indifference (let alone vengeful glee) when it comes to the brutalization, dehumanization, and degradation of prisoners, we might never have had to deal with the fallout of those appalling human rights travesties. Don't you folks realize that attitudes such as yours helped shift our prison system from rehabilitation to retribution, and have indirectly contributed to our unacceptably high recidivism rate? If prisoners are treated as little more than animals in cages, is there any wonder why so many of them return to lives of crime once they're released?
If it's true that the level of civilization of a given country can be judged by its prison system, then it's clear that long before Gitmo and Abu Ghraib, the US fell well short of being truly civilized. But, hey! America's prisons aren't quite as wretched as those of Russia or China (even if ours are far more numerous), so that should count for something, right? What an achievement!
Excellent points.
I'm of the opinion that people like Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld were convinced that their official sanctioning of torture would be approved of/defended by the vast majority of the American people precisely because of the fact that they've been so indifferent to the ballooning of the prison-industrial complex in the USA over the past 25 years, along with the inevitable increase in brutalities inflicted on the imprisoned.
And, after all, who's to say that they're wrong? The jury is still out as to whether the majority of Americans care that much about the existence of brutality and inhumane prison conditions.
Charles Graner is a designated scapegoat, plain and simple. Guilty, but still a scapegoat. Intended as fodder for future histories of the era, as in "the ringleader of the abusers was found guilty and sentenced to Federal prison- nothing more to see here- move on."
Much of the initial coverage about Fort Hood turned out to be wrong. Is there anything wrong with that?
The accountability imposed by another country for the CIA's kidnapping and torture reveals much about our own.
Fox News' morning show plays to type, talking about whether Muslims in the Army should face "special debriefings"
The survivor and author is upset about comparisons some on the right are making to genocide
Once seen as a lunatic fringe, reactionary anti-women groups are courting respectability
Salon headlines in your mailbox
