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All 72 pages of it.
Wow, where to begin.
First of all, this "a few bad apples" thing is, just on the evidence of the report, total bullshit. The worst instances of abuse may indeed have been perpetrated by a relatively small number of soldiers, but Taguba's argument throughout is that the entire 800th Brigade is rotten from top to bottom, and that the incidents of detainee abuse are just part of a much larger "systemic" problem that includes "detainee escapes and accountability lapses."
The first time I read "accountability lapses" I thought that meant lapses in personal accountability (which there certainly must have been). Oh my no. You have to get through the first section of the report--the one you're hearing all the quotes from, the one detailing the abuse--but in Part Two you find out that by "accountability lapse," they mean "failure to keep an accurate count of the prisoners."
That's right, folks. In addition to all the shit you've been reading about, *they weren't even sure half the time who they were holding.* Records of which prisoners were being held where were not kept up to date--which is a pity, since Abu Ghraib included a large population of what the British used to call "ordinary decent criminals" as well as prisoners who had been brought in on suspicion of committing "crimes against the coalition." So if they moved them around and didn't keep track, then they didn't know whether the prisoners who were getting interrogated were actually suspected of anti-coalition activity or not. Meanwhile, prisoner escapes were frequent and often went undocumented, and there were a significant number of "ghost detainees" who were brought in by "other government agencies," without any disclosure to the prison authorities of who they were or what they'd been picked up for. The fact that most of the prisoners were in civilian clothing (when they weren't being stripped naked and stacked in pyramids), and that there were a lot of civilian contractors *and* off-duty MPs wandering around in civilian clothing is cited as a contributing factor to the escapes and to confusion about exactly who was being held at any given time.
In addition, Karpinski complained that one of the reasons the facility was overcrowded--another thing that Taguba cites as a contributing factor to the abuses--is that a significant number of detainees who had been picked up on suspicion of "crimes against the coalition" but then determined to be uninvolved could not be released, even though Karpinski had recommended it, because the major-general who had the authority to do that refused to authorize it. So they were holding on to hundreds of detainees who had been brought in during some sweep of the area, been found to be not a threat to the coalition, and yet been kept in the prison anyway because some higher-up thought that was a good idea. Just to be on the safe side? To prevent them from talking about what had happeend to them in there? Who knows?
So, if anyone tries to argue that all this perversion is just a necessary part of the war on terror, do refer them to Part Two of the Taguba report, in which he establishes pretty clearly that there was no way for any of these MPs to really know whether the detainees they were setting the dogs on actually had any 'intelligence value' or not.
Another thing Taguba's report estbalishes clearly is that this latest investigation is the result of an ongoing pattern that was obvious as early as May 2003, when the first documented instances of prisoner abuse at Camp Bucca came to light--just at around the time that Bush was declaring the end of combat operations in Iraq. By November of 2003 there had been a major investigation of corrections operations in Iraq by Major General Ryder, which found many of the same problems and made many of the same recommendations that Taguba made. In addition, there were a number of smaller investigations following the prison riots and escapes that took place more or less constantly during the period Taguba investigated. For instance, there are documented escapes, riots, and/or shootings of prisoners in Abu Ghraib on November 5, November 7, November8, November 24, December 13, January 7, January 12, January 14, and January 26. Taguba concludes, based partly on Karpinski's own testimony, that there were probably *more* escapes that went undocumented. (So, not only do they not know who they're holding, they don't know how many, or which, of their detainees have escaped.) Although, according to Taguba, each of these investigations pointed to the same problems, nothing was done to correct them.
Why did things get this bad in the 800th Brigade? Well, Taguba certainly puts a lot of the blame on Karpinski, who he clearly holds in high contempt; but he also links the abuses to a report published by Miller--the guy who has now been put in charge of corrections in Iraq--that essentially recommends that policies based on interrogation practices at Guantanamo and in Afghanistan be used in Iraq. He also points out several times that in the absence of real training, the brigade appears to have relied heavily on lower-ranking soldiers who had worked in prisons in the U.S. Which really makes you wonder what the hell is going on at Guantanamo, and in Leavenworth too for that matter.
But another factor he identifies is the fact that the 800th brigade s one of the ones that had its deployment extended by a year without notice:
"...members of the 800th MP brigade believed they would be allowed to go home when all the detainees were released from the Camp Bucca Theater Internment Facility following the cessation of major ground combat on 1 May 2003. ...In late May early June 2003 the 800th MP Brigade was given a new mission to manage the Iraqi penal system and several detention centers. This new mission meant Soldiers would not redeploy to CONUS when anticipated. Morale suffered, and over the next few months there did not appear to have been any attempt by the Command to mitigate this morale problem."
So, part of the problem, at least according to Taguba, is that the soliders really thought that once Dubya put on his flight suit and paraded under that banner, that meant that their mission really *was* accomplished. I guess nobody higher up in the chain took them aside to apologize for this error, and explain that their commander in chief didn't really *mean* to yank their chains, he just needed some footage for his re-election campaign.
THere's more...so much more. But most priceless, perhaps, is Taguba's comment on his interview with Karpinski:
"What I found particularly disturbing in her testimony was her complete unwillingness to either understand or accept that many of the problems inherent in the 800th MP brigade were caused or exacerbated by poor leadership and the refusal of her command to both establish and enforce basic standards and principles among its soldiers."
Jeez. Why should he expect Karpinski to take responsibility for her own fuck-ups? Her commander in chief never has!
There'll be more, probably, in the column on Wednesday. For now, all I can say is:
* It is perfectly fucking clear that what happened at Abu Ghraib is the result of a more or less complete breakdown of responsibility at all levels, and is not just the result of five or six particularly demented individuals getting their rocks off.
* It is also perfectly fucking clear that the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib was authorized and encouraged both by individual civilian contractors and by Miller's recommendations about involving the MPs in "enabling" investigations--and that this kind of "enabling" was happening at Guantanamo more or less routinely before these practices were imported to Abu Ghraib.
* It is equally fucking clear that these abuses have been going on more or less since we started detaining prisoners in Iraq following the fall of Baghdad, and that several attempts at identifying and correcting major problems with the prison system we were 'running' went unheeded.
* If Rumsfeld is still claiming that he didn't know about the photographs until they emerged in the media, that's a crock. Taguba's report mentions the photographs several times and assures the reader that they are graphic and explicit and "sensitive," which is why he has not included them in the report. Rumsfeld might not have *seen* them--since they weren't included--but if he read the executive summary he certainly knew they existed.
And now I think I need a bath,
The Plaid Adder
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