:: NEWS COCKTAIL aka BlahBlahBlog ::
"Everything is being compressed into tiny tablets. You take a little pill of news every day - 23 minutes - and that's supposed to be enough." -Walter Cronkite, RE TV news. The Web has changed that for many, however, and here is an extra dose for your daily news cocktail. This prescription tends to include surveillance and now war-related links, along with the occasional pop culture junk and whatever else seizes my attention as I scan online news sites.:: 5.16.2004 ::
:: "The Gray Zone" ::
How a secret Pentagon program came to Abu Ghraib
by Seymour M. Hersch, the New Yorker
Excerpt:
The roots of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal lie not in the criminal inclinations of a few Army reservists but in a decision, approved last year by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, to expand a highly secret operation which had been focussed on the hunt for Al Qaeda, to the interrogation of prisoners in Iraq. Rumsfeld’s decision embittered the American intelligence community, damaged the effectiveness of élite combat units, and hurt America’s prospects in the war on terror.
According to interviews with several past and present American intelligence officials, the Pentagon’s operation, known inside the intelligence community by several code words, including Copper Green, encouraged physical coercion and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners in an effort to generate more intelligence about the growing insurgency in Iraq. A senior C.I.A. official, in confirming the details of this account last week, said that the operation stemmed from Rumsfeld’s long-standing desire to wrest control of America’s clandestine and paramilitary operations from the C.I.A.
Read more here.
ALSO:
The Roots of Torture
The road to Abu Ghraib began after 9/11, when Washington wrote new rules to fight a new kind of war. A Newsweek investigation
The Policy of Abuse
A Washington Post report
UNTIL THIS MONTH very little was publicly known about the Bush administration's procedures for handling and interrogating foreign detainees. Human rights groups had collected reports of abuses at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and in Afghanistan, reports that the administration dismissed or denied. Spokesmen pointed to President Bush's statement in June of last year that the United States would not violate an international convention against torture and to assurances that detainees in Guantanamo were being treated according to the principles of the Geneva Conventions. In the past two weeks, thanks to the furor over the photographs from Abu Ghraib prison and a series of congressional hearings, a disturbingly different picture has been revealed -- one that in its own way is shocking and damaging to America's place in the world.
posted by me
:: 9:55:00 AM [+] ::
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