One quiet, wintry night last year in the eastern Afghan town of Khost, a young government employee named Ismatullah simply vanished. He had last been seen in the town’s bazaar with a group of friends. Family members scoured Khost’s dust-doused streets for days. Village elders contacted Taliban commanders in the area who were wont to kidnap government workers, but they had never heard of the young man. Even the governor got involved, ordering his police to round up nettlesome criminal gangs that sometimes preyed on young bazaar-goers for ransom.
But the hunt turned up nothing. Spring and summer came and went with no sign of Ismatullah. Then one day, long after the police and village elders had abandoned their search, a courier delivered a neat, handwritten note on Red Cross stationary to the family. In it, Ismatullah informed them that he was in Bagram, an American prison more than 200 miles away. U.S. forces had picked him up while he was on his way home from the bazaar, the terse letter stated, and he didn’t know when he would be freed.
UPDATE: Jake Tapper, the White House correspondent for ABC News in the US, has just posted a blog which graphically illustrates the complicity of many in the US media — wittingly or unwittingly — in either missing or setting aside the main story. Instead of identifying and focusing on the main story, the content and context of the 2000 photographs and videotapes of detainee abuse, Tapper goes for the sideshow of the White House trashing of the Daily Telegraph’s interview with General Taguba.
Last month Enduring America paid a good deal of attention to the Obama White House’s decision to defy a court order and hold back 44 photographs, amongst hundreds and possibly thousands, of the abuse of detainees in US facilities in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other countries. We linked to Italian newspapers with a dozen of the images, posting the two most moderate — the story become our fifth-biggest in our eight months on the Web.
Last week, there was another series of developments — some illuminating, some confusing, all disturbing. It began on Thursday when The Daily Telegraph of London ran an article based on an interview with General Antonio Taguba, who led the 2004 internal investigation of the abuses at Abu Ghraib. According to the newspaper, Taguba said the photos showed “”torture, abuse, rape and every indecency”. The Daily Telegraph highlighted “a soldier apparently raping a female prisoner, a translator apparently raping a male prisoner, and instances of sexual abuse involving objects”. Read the rest of this entry »
Halfway through President Obama’s speech on national security, including torture, the Guantanamo Bay detention regime, and the tensions in transparency and state secrets, I thought:
He’s nailed it. Flat-out nailed it.
Obama illuminated with flashes of rhetoric: ““We cannot keep this country safe unless we enlist the power of our most fundamental values.” He used the setting of the National Archives, with America’s founding documents: “We must never – ever – turn our back on [the Constitution's] enduring principles for expediency’s sake.” He turned inside-out the Bushian cloak of national security and “our boys” when he criticised waterboarding and other techniques of torture: Read the rest of this entry »
Last week, when we wrote about testimony by Philip Zelikow and Ali Soufan to a Senate hearing on torture, reader John Birch wrote perceptively, “Zelikow was testifying about the organized use of toture as an interrogation method by the CIA….The photos [Obama] held back are of the abuse and even torture of prisoners by the U.S. military.” This prompted my response, “The connection is that the authorisation of torture by the CIA and US military, sanctioned from spring 2002 by Bush officials, made its way to Guantanamo Bay and then to Iraq, including Abu Ghraib,” notably via General Geoffrey Miller.
Writing for Salon, Mark Benjamin adds an interesting dimension: Gitmo general told Iraq WMD search team to torture
[Even] before Miller met with the Abu Ghraib officials, he first made a little-known visit to the Iraq Survey Group, which was in charge of the hunt for WMDs in Iraq after the invasion. Miller told the ISG they were “running a country club” by not getting tough on detainees….Miller recommended temperature manipulation and sleep deprivation.
Gitmo general told Iraq WMD search team to torture
It’s one thing if, as former Vice President Dick Cheney keeps saying, the United States brutally interrogated people to keep our kids safe from another strike by Osama bin Laden. If folks got tortured to provide a rationale for going to war with Iraq, though, that’s a whole different story. Read the rest of this entry »
UPDATE (18 May): Italian newspapers La Repubblica and Il Corriere della Sera have now published some of the photos. (Hat tip to Nur al-Cubicle via UJ).
When the scandal over the Abu Ghraib abuse photographs broke in 2004, it was reported that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was worried over “hundreds” more, as well as videotapes, that had not been revealed. It is probable that these photographs are among those whose release is being challenged by President Obama.
After a great deal of discussion, Enduring America has decided to post the two “most moderate” photographs. We do so not to be sensationalist or voyeuristic but to show the “enhanced interrogation” carried out in America’s name not only in Iraq but from Guantanamo Bay to Afghanistan to unnamed countries from 2002. We do so as an expression of concern that, in the name of “national security”, the seriousness of this torture will be minimised by hiding it from us. We do so in the belief that acknowledgement of the past does not endanger America in the present but begins to redeem it.
The always excellent Dan Froomkin, blogging for The Washington Post, captures a lot of what I was trying to say — but finding it difficult because of anger and sadness — this morning. Drawing on other analysts as well as Obama’s own words, he takes apart the six excuses for refusing the court order to release the photographs of detainee abuse:
Deconstructing Obama’s Excuses
In trying to explain his startling decision to oppose the public release of more photos depicting detainee abuse, President Obama and his aides yesterday put forth six excuses for his about-face, one more flawed than the next.
First, there was the nothing-to-see-here excuse. In his remarks yesterday afternoon, Obama said the “photos that were requested in this case are not particularly sensational, especially when compared to the painful images that we remember from Abu Ghraib.” Read the rest of this entry »
GEN. ODIERNO: Well, good afternoon. How we doing today? I have about a five-minute opening statement that I’d like to make, and then obviously I’ll open it up to any questions that you all might have.
What I’d like to start out by talking about is, first, we continue to see overall levels of violence at or near the lowest levels since the summer of 2003 inside of Iraq. And overall, from an overall perspective, security in Iraq remains improved. Read the rest of this entry »
We don’t like our evil to be banal. Ten years after Columbine, it only now may be sinking in that the psychopathic killers were not jock-hating dorks from a “Trench Coat Mafia,” or, as ABC News maintained at the time, “part of a dark, underground national phenomenon known as the Gothic movement.” In the new best seller “Columbine,” the journalist Dave Cullen reaffirms that Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris were instead ordinary American teenagers who worked at the local pizza joint, loved their parents and were popular among their classmates.
On Tuesday, it will be five years since Americans first confronted the photographs from Abu Ghraib on “60 Minutes II.” Here, too, we want to cling to myths that quarantine the evil. If our country committed torture, surely it did so to prevent Armageddon, in a patriotic ticking-time-bomb scenario out of “24.” If anyone deserves blame, it was only those identified by President Bush as “a few American troops who dishonored our country and disregarded our values”: promiscuous, sinister-looking lowlifes like Lynddie England, Charles Graner and the other grunts who were held accountable while the top command got a pass. Read the rest of this entry »
Anand Gopal writes for TomDispatch:
UPDATE: Jake Tapper, the White House correspondent for ABC News in the US, 
Halfway through 
Last week, when we wrote about testimony by Philip Zelikow and Ali Soufan to a Senate hearing on torture, reader John Birch wrote perceptively, “Zelikow was testifying about the organized use of toture as an interrogation method by the CIA….The photos [Obama] held back are of the abuse and even torture of prisoners by the U.S. military.” This prompted my response, “The connection is that the authorisation of torture by the CIA and US military, sanctioned from spring 2002 by Bush officials, made its way to Guantanamo Bay and then to Iraq, including Abu Ghraib,” notably via General Geoffrey Miller.
The always excellent Dan Froomkin, 
GEN. ODIERNO: Well, good afternoon. How we doing today? I have about a five-minute opening statement that I’d like to make, and then obviously I’ll open it up to any questions that you all might have.
Frank Rich in The New York Times
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