The Roots of Torture
The road to Abu Ghraib began after 9/11, when Washington wrote new rules to fight a new kind of war. A NEWSWEEK investigation

It's not easy to get a member of Congress to stop talking. Much less a room full of them. But as a small group of legislators watched the images flash by in a small, darkened hearing room in the Rayburn Building last week, a sickened silence descended. There were 1,800 slides and several videos, and the show went on for three hours. The nightmarish images showed American soldiers at Abu Ghraib Prison forcing Iraqis to masturbate. American soldiers sexually assaulting Iraqis with chemical light sticks. American soldiers laughing over dead Iraqis whose bodies had been abused and mutilated. There was simply nothing to say. "It was a very subdued walk back to the House floor," said Rep. Jane Harman, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee. "People were ashen."

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  thanks to Whiskey Bar

How high does it go?
The more we find out about what happened at Abu Ghraib, the less it looks like a case of renegade soldiers.

Last week, as the Bush administration struggled to contain the Abu Ghraib prison torture scandal, Peter Feaver, a Duke University professor and former National Security Council staff member, suggested a worst-case scenario for the White House: If "a senior civilian, or maybe even [Secretary of Defense] Rumsfeld, [had] signed a memo that indicated, yes, sexual humiliation for prisoners is OK." Now Seymour Hersh has summoned that worst-case scenario to life with an article in the May 24 issue of the New Yorker, providing evidence alleging that Rumsfeld secretly approved a plan to use harsh interrogation methods on prisoners in Iraq -- including methods that "encouraged physical coercion and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners." The Pentagon labeled the article "outlandish, conspiratorial and filled with error and anonymous conjecture," but it did not specify the errors and had the sound of a classic nondenial denial. Rumsfeld's attempt to dismiss the piece did not forestall bipartisan calls in Congress for further investigation, with Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., the ranking member of the Armed Services Committee, declaring that Hersh's article raises the scandal to "a whole new level." At the same time, Newsweek reports this week that in the wake of 9/11, White House counsel Alberto Gonzales advised President Bush that the Geneva Convention articles that deal with interrogating prisoners of war might not apply to the war on terrorism.

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Army, CIA want torture truths exposed   thanks to The Agonist

3 Witnesses at Iraq Abuse Hearing Refused to Testify

Three key witnesses, including a senior officer in charge of interrogations, refused to testify during a secret hearing against an alleged ringleader of the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal on the grounds that they might incriminate themselves. The witnesses appeared April 26 at a preliminary hearing behind closed doors for Cpl. Charles A. Graner Jr., who has been identified in court-martial documents as the leader of a band of military police guards who humiliated and abused Iraqi detainees and compiled a bizarre photographic record of their activities. The prospective witnesses' refusal to testify is described in court-martial documents obtained by The Times on Tuesday. That all of the prospective witnesses called up by prosecutors invoked the military equivalent of the 5th Amendment right against self-incrimination indicates that key players in the abuse scandal may be closing ranks to save themselves and one another.

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