General Took Guantánamo Rules to Iraq for Handling of Prisoners (NYTimes!)

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/13/politics/13MILL.html?hp=&pagewanted=print&position=

General Took Guantánamo Rules to Iraq for Handling of Prisoners
By TIM GOLDEN and ERIC SCHMITT

<snip>

According to information from a classified interview with the senior military intelligence officer at Abu Ghraib prison, General Miller's recommendations prompted a shift in the interrogation and detention procedures there. Military intelligence officers were given greater authority in the prison, and military police guards were asked to help gather information about the detainees.

Whether those changes contributed to the abuse of prisoners that grew horrifically more serious last fall is now at the center of the widening prison scandal.

General Miller's recommendations were based in large part on his command of the detention camp in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, where he won praise from the Pentagon for improving the flow of intelligence from terrorist suspects and prisoners of the Afghanistan war.

In Iraq, General Miller's team gave officers at the prisons copies of the procedures that had been developed at Guantánamo to interrogate and punish the prisoners, according to the officer who traveled with him. Computer specialists and intelligence analysts explained the systems they had used in Cuba to process information and report it back to the United States.

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I think the NYTimes just connected some big dots! This is good reporting!

The tide is turning. Once the media decides to tell the truth, BushCo is DONE. Maybe this is why Rummy is still hinting at leaving?

has been generally amazing ... hard hitting, connecting dots, naming names, with real depth and dimension. They've been doing real reporting again ... and it feels almost unreal. Who let the dogs out?

After all, who leaked those prison pictures?

Or maybe the NYTimes staff starting reading Krugman.

according to one article I read, they've been leaking like a faucet.

of honest whistle-blowing. It was too late for damage control.

:kick:

for times marked by scared, divided, scandal-plagued elites. When there's blood in the water, pack journalists attack (remember the corporate scandals of August 2002? For a brief spell, Democrats sounded like socialists and the press behaved like earnest muckrakers. Then came the October surprise of WMDs and war-screams for Iraq and the press resumed their compliant stenographer role). I hope this news pattern lasts, but I don't think this is a permanent sea-change in press behavior(too bad the election is so far off).

Reality is radical and even pravda has to report the facts now and again

And the fact is Bush is a damaged candidate. However, these people are capable of anything and will do anything to retain power.

After the attacks of Sept. 11, President Bush signed a series of directives authorizing the C.I.A. to conduct a covert war against Osama bin Laden's Qaeda network. The directives empowered the C.I.A. to kill or capture Qaeda leaders, but it is not clear whether the White House approved the specific rules for the interrogations.

The White House and the C.I.A. declined to comment on the matter.

The C.I.A. detention program for Qaeda leaders is the most secretive component of an extensive regime of detention and interrogation put into place by the United States government after the Sept. 11 attacks and the war in Afghanistan that includes the detention facilities run by the military in Iraq and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

There is now concern at the agency that the Congressional and criminal inquiries into abuses at Pentagon-run prisons and other detention centers in Iraq and Afghanistan may lead to examinations of the C.I.A's handling of the Qaeda detainees. That, in turn, could expose agency officers and operations to the same kind of public exposure as the military now faces because of the Iraq prison abuses.

So far, the agency has refused to grant any independent observer or human rights group access to the high-level detainees, who have been held in strict secrecy. Their whereabouts are such closely guarded secrets that one official said he had been told that Mr. Bush had informed the C.I.A. that he did not want to know where they were.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/13/politics/13DETA.html

in answer to one of Senator Jack Reed's questions at the hearing

From Democratic Underground
Dated Tuesday May 11

Who is Responsible?
By Jack Rabbit

The conditions under which prisoners are kept at Guantanamo are the subject of some international concern. Few outsiders have seen the camp and reported on it. Those who have, condemn it. Prisoners are housed in small cages with little protection from the elements. Human Rights Watch has called the conditions “a scandal”, long before Abu Ghraib made headlines. A British jurist looking into the situation at one of the Guantanamo camps called the conditions one of "utter lawlessness" . . . .
The use of torture is the main concern in the Abu Ghraib case. Several former inmates have charged they were tortured at Guantanamo. In the her open letter to Mr. Bush . . . Amnesty International Secretary General Irene Khan relays charges of torture from two former Guantanamo inmates . . . . If the Bush administration wants to send signals that this situation at Abu Ghraib is just some sort of mistake, then it is sending the wrong ones. First, they have sent to clean up the wrongdoing at Abu Ghraib none other than General Geoffrey Miller, fresh from his command at Guantanamo Bay. In light of the alleged violations of human rights at Guantanamo, this seems a bit like trying to clear up some irregularities in the accounting department by putting a suspected embezzler in charge.

Read more.