Prisoner abuse 'on wider scale', US report says Mark Oliver Wednesday May 26, 2004
An official US army overview of the deaths and alleged abuse of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan has revealed a wider scale of mistreatment than has so far come to light, it was reported today.
The New York Times said it had obtained a recent army synopsis of the status of investigations into 36 cases of alleged abuse relating to US units...
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Some how as this story fades from view, I am left with a continued annoyance that nobody in the press with the possible exception of Hersh, has put the dots together. This is still spun as abuse and mistreatment of prisoners story.
The story is not a mistreatment and abuse story. It is a look at the War on Terror as it was planned, implemented and is currently being conducted.
To re-iterate, places like Abu Ghraib are not prisons. They are holding, torture, and interrogation centers to get intelligence information that may or may not be relevant to some immediate military operation, and to collect background information that might become useful for later operations. Once it is determined that the individual's information has been exhausted and they are not actively part of a combat operation of some sort they are released. If it is determined they were part of a combat operation of some sort, they are most probably moved to some other detention center for indefinite detention, and most probably extended interrogations conducted by others.
This system has nothing to do with what we conceive as criminal justice system with ordinary police, courts, prosecutors, defense lawyers, trials, witnesses, evidence, findings, juries, verdicts, sentencing and prisons. There is no such thing as Law in the Abu Ghraib system. It isn't a legal system, and it was never intended to be a legal system of any sort. In fact it was intended to be an illegal or extra-legal system.
This system was designed by WH, DoJ, and DoD legal counsels like Matt Gonzales and John Yoo to completely avoid all law provisions of the US, Geneva Conventions, and US military rules of war. As such the system has nothing to do with Law. It is designed to avoid Law, all laws against such activity by the state. In effect the system was designed to be a legally justifiable system in which no laws apply. Somebody called Guantanamo, legal outer space.
It seems to me that if public officials sit down in a series of secret meetings with lawyers to determine how to legally justify a system to capture, torture, interrogate, and dispose of large numbers of people, that such meetings are a conspiracy to break the law. In other words if you conspire to engage in various activities that are against the law, that in itself is a crime. Since the list of criminal activities also include war crimes, then it seems to me the US government actively conspired to commit war crimes.
So the real story as far as I am concerned is who, when, where and how did US government officials conspire to commit war crimes and call it the War on Terror. The so-called abuse of detainees is a mere artifact to this story.
If anything rises to the charge of High Crimes and Misdemeanors it should be to deliberately engage in war under false pretense and conspiracy to commit war crimes on occupied and subjected peoples.
Never mind. I apologize. It was a moment of liberal hysteria and weakness on my part. It shant happen again.
CG