Sid Blumenthal's article in Salon.com on the torture controversy is one of the best I've seen: "Abuse"? How about torture 05/06/04.
The Bush administration was well aware of the Taguba report but was more concerned about its exposure than its contents. Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was dispatched on a mission to CBS News to tell the network to suppress its story and the horrifying pictures. For two weeks, CBS's "60 Minutes II" complied, until it became known that the New Yorker would be publishing excerpts of the Taguba report in its May 10 issue. Myers was then sent on the Sunday morning news programs to explain, but under questioning he acknowledged that he had still not read the report he had tried to censor from the public for weeks. ...
Bush has created what is in effect a gulag. It stretches from Afghanistan to Iraq, from Guantánamo to secret CIA prisons around the world. There are perhaps 10,000 people being held in Iraq, 1,000 in Afghanistan, almost 700 in Guantánamo -- no one knows the exact numbers. The law as it applies to them is whatever the executive deems necessary. The administration has argued before the Supreme Court in the case of Jose Padilla, the so-called al-Qaida dirty bomber, that anyone who is considered a threat to national security, even a U.S. citizen, can disappear forever, never be charged with any crime, and never receive any legal representation.
There has been nothing like this system since the adoption of the Geneva Conventions after World War II and the fall of the Soviet Union.
Billmon comments on Blumenthal's story and puts the current situation in the context of White House scandal-management:
The photographic evidence, however, couldn't be controlled -- the gang should have seen that from the start -- and somebody (Taguba?) became so angry about the way the report was being buried that they leaked it to Sy Hersh. The stonewall crumbled.
Now we're going down the "limited hangout" road, in which the sins of Abu Ghraib are admitted, but hopefully contained there. In that sense, the prison has become this scandal's equivalent of the [Watergate-era] Committee to Reelect the President - a would-be firebreak to keep the story from burning back up the trail to the real decision makers back in Washington. Rumsfeld is starting to look like the new John Mitchell - the fallback fall guy if the story can't be stopped in Baghdad.
Blumenthal's story is also in the Guardian (UK) under the title This is the new gulag 05/06/04.
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