No Blood, No Foul by Scott Horton

May 24, 10:10 AM, 2011

In the period immediately following the publication in 2004 of photographs from Abu Ghraib, the Department of Defense pledged to fully investigate every allegation of prisoner mistreatment. By 2006, the department was asserting that it had opened some 842 inquiries or investigations. The reports it went on to produce were as thorough and professional as possible under the circumstances, but only a handful resulted in further action. Moreover, their existence obscured the relationship between the alleged abuses and Pentagon policymakers.

Joshua E.S. Phillips’s recent report for The Nation and PBS’s Need to Know suggests that the Rumsfeld Pentagon was keen to open a large number of investigative files on Abu Ghraib primarily to create the impression of diligence. President Obama furthered this illusion in 2009 when, in reversing his earlier position against releasing photographic evidence of torture and prisoner abuse, he insisted that “Individuals who violated standards of behavior in these photos have been investigated and held accountable.”

In other words, Obama was suggesting, the perpetrators had been punished and it was time to move on. But interviews conducted by Phillips with people at the core of the U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Command’s efforts on Abu Ghraib show persuasively that the bulk of incidents were never actually investigated or acted on. Among Phillips’s more alarming findings:

•The five CID agents who were interviewed for the article, four of whom worked on the agency’s Detainee Abuse Task Force (DATF) during 2005, said there was no consensus over what constituted abuse, especially with respect to interrogation techniques. They also said the case files they received were often missing key pieces of evidence, that they hadn’t had access to competent Arabic translators, and that they were rarely able to track down victims who had been released from detention. They further added that they were overwhelmed by the hundreds of abuse cases they’d been ordered to reopen—orders one agent speculated were given so the military could duck Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests from the ACLU.
•John Renaud, the retired Army warrant officer who headed DATF for the first half of 2005, now says of the task force, “It didn’t accomplish anything—it was a whitewash.” Neither he nor his fellow agents could recall a single investigated case advancing to a court-martial hearing.

in full: http://www.harpers.org/archive/2011/05/hbc-90008098

Thanks for posting this link. This is so wrong.