Hersh, on Taguba, on torture
Sully was on this on Saturday and on Sunday. Everyone should read Seymour Hersh’s latest report, all nine pages of it. Yes, there are filters to be applied — how much you trust Hersh, how much you think that Gen. Taguba is bitter — but this is happening in your name.
Taguba said that he saw “a video of a male American soldier in uniform sodomizing a female detainee.” The video was not made public in any of the subsequent court proceedings, nor has there been any public government mention of it
Just some hazing, right, Rush? Right?
Maybe it’s not as bad as it seems, but is secrecy the best way to work it out? Might it be, you know, that secrecy is actually better suited to concealing wrongdoing? If I wrap myself in a flag, can I sell you a bridge?
Taguba claims that he was boxed in, prevented from investigating the provenance of the orders that ended up contributing to/legitimising the events at Abu Ghraib:
“From what I knew, troops just don’t take it upon themselves to initiate what they did without any form of knowledge of the higher-ups,” Taguba told me. His orders were clear, however: he was to investigate only the military police at Abu Ghraib, and not those above them in the chain of command. “These M.P. troops were not that creative,” he said. “Somebody was giving them guidance, but I was legally prevented from further investigation into higher authority. I was limited to a box.”
Oh yeah, and Rumsfeld’s testimony to Congress was, at best, hard to believe:
Taguba, watching the hearings, was appalled. He believed that Rumsfeld’s testimony was simply not true. “The photographs were available to him—if he wanted to see them,” Taguba said. Rumsfeld’s lack of knowledge was hard to credit. Taguba later wondered if perhaps Cambone had the photographs and kept them from Rumsfeld because he was reluctant to give his notoriously difficult boss bad news. But Taguba also recalled thinking, “Rumsfeld is very perceptive and has a mind like a steel trap. There’s no way he’s suffering from C.R.S.—Can’t Remember Shit. He’s trying to acquit himself, and a lot of people are lying to protect themselves.” It distressed Taguba that Rumsfeld was accompanied in his Senate and House appearances by senior military officers who concurred with his denials.
Read the whole thing. Remember it when you watch the debates for party nominations and, later, for the Presidency and Congressional positions. Remember who has taken a stand and who hasn’t. Remember what those stands where. Remember it when you vote.
I just re-read it and should have also quoted its last paragraph, which is a statement by Gen. Taguba:
Comment by Adam — 6/18/2007 @ 8:52 am
I’ve been meaning to get to this, but was sort of waiting for Sully’s more extended thoughts.
Taguba’s original report, even though is sounds like it was hand-tied, was still shocking. It basically outlined, between the lines, a national program of torture de facto legalized in secret and, where bad publicity was created, responsibility for it was punted off on the grunts (responsibility in the military is generally supposed to go up; after Abu Gharib, it was clearly going down; rarely has the generic private been so cynically skape-goated in what is, really, a program determined by generals and civil political leadership (not that the private should have avoided consequences, but it was pretty damn clear that it wasn’t some late night spontaneous decision on his part).
At this point, anybody who can look at the evidence and not conclude that we have systematically institutionalized and legalized torture, is working very hard indeed to fool themselves. There’s simply no other conclusion to reasonably be reached. That needs to be dragged out into the middle of the street. So far, pro-torture folks have gotten by by skirting the issue, trying to mitigate the reality of it with ridiculous hypotheticals, feigned “real world”ism, and constant side-stepping. The real dichotomy is easy. We either torture, or we don’t. You’re either supporting one side of that equation, or the other. I’m not an absolutist on most issues, but there’s no way not to be on this one. The debate is that simple, and for those of us who are against the thought of America as a nation that routinely embraces and utilizes torture, we have a responsibility to immediately stomp our foot down when the pedants, the mitigists, the 24 Republicans, start trying to repackage the terms of the debate because they don’t have the balls to say what line it is they’re really pushing, which is that torture needs to now be an accepted facet of American policy.
The sad truth is, and I mean this not as invective or hyperbole, the architects of our war policy in the Bush administration are war criminals. That’s another absolutely unavoidable conclusion.
Comment by Brad — 6/18/2007 @ 9:06 am
I’m not an enormous Hersh fan (although I’m not inclined to disbelieve everything he says, or anything like that), but I respect Taguba and, unless Taguba refutes the content of the Hersh article, I am inclined to take it as significant further evidence that Abu Ghraib was a lot less accidental than it has, by many of our fellow conservatives, been portrayed to be.
I’d like to see some reaction to the Hersh piece on the conservative blogs (will try to search some out, but haven’t really looked yet).
Comment by Adam — 6/18/2007 @ 10:29 am
Well, Hersh is a rabid guy whe it comes to his political opinions, but his reporting has been about the best investigative journalism work in the last 50 years. From Vietnam to Abu Gharib. He can hit a story from a wrong angle sometimes, but he’s rarely wrong, and in this case, backed up by so much presumably on-the-record stuff, it’d have to be a pretty solid case to refute it.
Good luck on finding conservative reaction.
Comment by Brad — 6/18/2007 @ 10:33 am
Did a quick check of a small number of sites (so, no claims to representativeness). Basically I was looking for ‘Hersh’ or ‘Taguba’ and using search functions if they have them, or else searching on what is displayed in the browser in an index view of the blog main page for the last two or three days.
Nothing on the Corner that I could find. Didn’t find anything at MichelleMalkin.com, but her new site isn’t working properly so maybe it’s there somewhere and I just didn’t find it. Didn’t find anything at Captain’s Quarters. Couldn’t find anything at Pajamas Media, either.
Looked at a couple of commuity sites: Freerepublic have a thread on it, many of the comments being to the effect that Hersh is a lying scumbag, or similar. Couldn’t find anything at RedState (apart from a mention of Hersh as being on one of the morning political shows).
Again, no claims that this is representative of conservative blogs in general.
Comment by Adam — 6/19/2007 @ 9:44 am
I’ll make that claim for you.
That is representative of conservative blogs in general.
Comment by Brad — 6/19/2007 @ 11:03 am