As for the particular degrading activities shown in the pics we have all seen, I don't think they are particularly American, either...
...they seem to have been especially designed to fit the particular ways that men can be most humiliated in Islamic culture...I deduce that someone who knew that culture very well drew up the plans for the actions. As has been frequently pointed out, the perps were primarily young reservists from West Virginia and other Appalachian areas, who were hardly familiar with Islamic culture, so I doubt that the whole thing was their idea. We still have a lot to learn about exactly who managed this whole business, and how it was done.
Jon Johanning
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I can't stop thinking about this. I have two for training candidates. First the US School of the Americas---which they renamed. And second of course Israeli military consultants. Then the whatever is the usual army base for military intelligence and interrogation schools. These Israeli experts would add the missing `Islamic' flavor while the School of the Americas teaches the basic torture, intimidation, and interrogation methods in a civilian context---as used in all the fascist regimes we've propped up for decades. The CIA and Army military intelligence would have to teach the way or the how-to's on putting raw interrogation data into a picture and connect the `intelligence' dots, i.e. process data into information.
But the more important thing to do is figure out how to prove this (torture) isn't some isolated fluke in Abu Ghraib, but part of a general system, part of Bush's war on terror. In other words we are not looking at an `incident', we are looking at the `plan'.
There must have been a big re-thinking and re-design series of meetings that would involve DoJ, DoD, CIA on how to develop intelligence gathering and actions against foreign terrorism, post-9/11. Did these officials decide to use existing programs and agencies or did they decide to put together some newer entity. My guess would be a new ad hoc entity because existing systems already have their own jobs and are probably fixed in their ways, chains of command, budgets, etc.
Maybe the way to go about this is to look at camp X-Ray in Guantanamo and its first sister in Kandahar(?) or where ever they first caught and processed John Walker Lind. You might be able to trace out what military units and civilian agencies dealt with him from the trial transcripts, or at least get hints on how to re-construct this system, whatever the fuck it is. Part of that re-construction is to identify the names of programs and projects and trace those back to their agency's organization outline and the congressional implementing legislation that authorized them.
Of course it would be nice if somebody in this system came forward and laid it all out. But that seems unlikely. On the other hand, it might be sitting there in the open view already laid out in the congressional record or on the web. Actually thinking on it, Amnesty International or Human Rights Watch has probably put the general outline of this system together.
What I would want to find is a hierarchy of military and civilian units and programs linked together with a paper trail of orders and memos that lead up the ladder to a Bush appointee like Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Armatiage, Negreponte(?), or our old friends Poindexter and Abrams. Is Poindexter still on the pay roll? I know it would be pointless to get any action from this, but at least it would be on the public record. The US is engaged in systematic war crimes.
Then I would want to do a couple of living examples, individual cases, and follow them from the situation of their capture through their processing and transport and where they ended up and what happened to them. The idea would be to show they were typical of what has (and is) happened to thousands of people in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The whole attempt to label the random people seized with words like Terrorist, Prisoner of War, or Enemy Combatants, and claim torture is `prisoner abuse' (along with the controversies over the Patriot Act) tells me this is a system. Hell I know it is a system. It's just a matter of diagraming it out.
I suspect that people in the military, like Taguba who called the abuse `systemic' didn't see the forest for the trees.
(just read another thread from Mark Pavlick mentioning a lot of this. i am at work at the moment so more later.)
CG