Afghan prison abuse charges coming
More than 20 US soldiers to be charged in deaths of detainees.
US Army investigators will recommend that charges be
brought against 26 soldiers for their roles in the death of two Afghan detainees at the US Army's sprawling Baghram air base in Afghanistan.
The Washington Post reported Tuesday that the deaths occurred in December 2002. The investigations, which took well over a year to complete, "range from negligent homicide to less serious offenses such as dereliction of duty and failure to report an offense, two Army officers familiar with the case said."
While the number of soldiers charged in this incident approaches the number of soldiers charged in the prison abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib prison,
The Associated Press reported Tuesday that Army sources believe this story
will not have the impact of the one centered in Iraq for two reasons: it happened two years ago, and so far no pictures of the incident at Baghram have appeared.
The
Post said that most of the soldiers facing charges are from the Fort Bragg, N.C.-based 519th Military Intelligence Battalion and the 377th Military Police Company, an Army Reserve unit based in Cincinnati. Some members of the 519th intelligence unit were later deployed to Iraq and have also been implicated in the abuse of prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison that occurred in late 2003.
The
Chicago Sun-Times reports that the fallout from the Abu Ghraib scandal
could end the careers of four US Army generals. The men received varying degrees of criticism in two recent investigative reports dealing with the abuse at the prison in Baghdad. The
Sun-Times writes that the most senior general of the four mentioned, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, has already been passed over for a promotion to four star general. The other generals are Maj. Gen. Barbara Fast, Maj. Gen. Walter Wojdakowski, and Army Reserve Brigadier General Janis Karpinski.
All four are "essentially finished in the military," even if they are not forced to resign, said Dan Goure, a defense analyst at the Lexington Institute think tank."At the very minimum you could argue that they lost control" of their subordinates.
The Washington Post reported Monday that Lt. Gen. Sanchez had written a secret memo last September to his boss at US Central Command outlining "more-aggressive interrogation methods he planned to authorize immediately." Among those tactics was the
use of dogs on prisoners. Sanchez wrote that he wanted to "exploit the Arab fear of dogs."
While the memo was recinded in a month, and replaced with a more cautious version – saying muzzled dogs could only be used with Sanchez's direct approval – the use of unmuzzled dogs in questioning had already begun.
The Arizona Republic reports on how the aftershocks of the two recent reports on the abuse at Abu Ghraib have started to
ripple across US military bases, including Fort Huachuca, 75 miles east of Tucson and home to the US Army intelligence enter, "the nation's premier training site for military interrogators." One of the soldiers who received criticism for "lapses in leadership" in a Pentagon-sponsored report, Capt. Carolyn Wood, is currently training at the base.
Capt. Wood, a highly decorated soldier, was was officer in charge of interrogations at Abu Ghraib when a special team of five soldiers was sent from Fort Huachuca to provide interrogation training at the Iraqi prison.
"Although the Fort Huachuca team was successful in arranging a few classes . . . the training that was given was ineffective and certainly did nothing to prevent the abuses occurring at Abu Ghraib," the report said. The "team's lack of understanding of approved doctrine was a significant failure." But Bruce Fein, a constitutional lawyer, wrote Monday in the
Washington Times that all the national "hand wringing" about Abu Ghraib, is
much ado about nothing.
In military promotions, a fastidious concern for protecting the health and welfare of detainees earns trivial kudos compared with a muscular desire to crush and to demoralize the enemy, like Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman's march from Atlanta to the sea. Thus, naturally ambitious officers and soldiers were given low career incentives to master and to follow international humanitarian conventions to soften war's horrors. These contextual facts should make the microscopic number of detainee abuses a source of satisfaction with a stimulus for improvement, not a provocation for self-righteous sermonizing. But in reviewing the press coverage of the situation at Abu Ghraib, and the way similar situations in other countries are reported,
Under the Same Sun, an antiwar blog, looks at the way
different words are used to describe the same situation.
Also...
•
American lawyer finds new evidence of recent torture in Iraq (
New Standard)
•
Chalabi escapes assassination bid (
BBC)
•
In western Iraq, fundamentalists hold US at bay (
New York Times)
•
Hackers hijack federal computers (
USA Today)
• Feedback appreciated. E-mail
Tom Regan
.
|
RSS feed