Inside the Detainee Abuse Task Force (Whitewash)

http://www.thenation.com/article/160560/inside-detainee-abuse-task-force

Most days in 2005, a small group of agents with the Detainee Abuse Task Force (DATF) trickled into their one-room office at Camp Victory, part of the sprawling Victory Base Complex surrounding Baghdad's airport. The camp's centerpiece is Saddam Hussein's glitzy Al-Faw Palace, which once hosted Baath party loyalists before serving as coalition headquarters, but the DATF was housed in a far more modest one-story building nearby. In a room next to their fellow agents in the Army's Criminal Investigation Command, known as CID, DATF agents investigated hundreds of cases of alleged detainee abuse.

(snip)

The five CID agents who were interviewed for this article, four of whom worked on the DATF during 2005, said there was no consensus over what constituted abuse, especially when it came to interrogation techniques. They said the case files they received were often missing key pieces of evidence. They said they faced noncooperation from some military units they were investigating. They said they didn't have competent Arabic translators and were rarely able to track down victims once they'd been released from detention. They said they were overwhelmed by hundreds of abuse cases they'd been ordered to reopen, which one agent speculated was done to avoid responding to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests from the ACLU.

Jon Renaud, a retired Army Warrant Officer who headed the task force as the Special Agent in Charge for the first half of 2005, now says of the DATF, "It didn't accomplish anything—it was a whitewash." Neither he nor his fellow agents could recall a single case they investigated that actually advanced to a court-martial hearing, known as an Article 32.

(snip)

"I think Americans don't want to realize how widespread it was, how awful it was," said Burke. "They like to think, 'Oh, it was just a few night guards at Abu Ghraib.' What we have learned is some of the other sites were actually worse. Camp Cropper—the physical torture there was just horrific. The mobile interrogation units—again, the torture there, terrible."

(end snips)

IMHO, somebody in the past misadministration (Bushco) had a jones for torture. IMHO, there is no other explanation for doing that to so many other human beings.

The torture story reached a "satisfactory" conclusion with the initial discoveries and the show trials. The populace moved on and the politicians could carry on as normal because the "book" had been "closed".