General Taguba wrote the Army report on the abuses at Abu Ghraib. Seymour M. Hersh talked to the General. This is a must read.

The General’s Report
How Antonio Taguba, who investigated the Abu Ghraib scandal, became one of its casualties.
by Seymour M. Hersh

“They always shoot the messenger,” Taguba told me. “To be accused of being overzealous and disloyal—that cuts deep into me. I was being ostracized for doing what I was asked to do.” Taguba went on, “There was no doubt in my mind that this stuff”—the explicit images—“was gravitating upward. It was standard operating procedure to assume that this had to go higher. The President had to be aware of this.” He said that Rumsfeld, his senior aides, and the high-ranking generals and admirals who stood with him as he misrepresented what he knew about Abu Ghraib had failed the nation. “From the moment a soldier enlists, we inculcate loyalty, duty, honor, integrity, and selfless service,” Taguba said. “And yet when we get to the senior-officer level we forget those values. I know that my peers in the Army will be mad at me for speaking out, but the fact is that we violated the laws of land warfare in Abu Ghraib. We violated the tenets of the Geneva Convention. We violated our own principles and we violated the core of our military values. The stress of combat is not an excuse, and I believe, even today, that those civilian and military leaders responsible should be held accountable.”

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  thanks to Huffington Post

US signals permanent stay in Iraq
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This spring's debate over a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq may have implied that the US presence there is likely to wind down soon, but recent comments from both the administration and military officials suggest a different scenario.

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US Military Riding the
Perfect (Sine) Wave

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Iraq: Isolate, Concentrate, Annihilate

The classic anti-insurgency strategy is isolate, concentrate, annihilate. Isolate the guerillas from the population, concentrate them, once they're concentrated, annihilate them. But there's another type of isolation, concentration and annihilation, and as GorillasGuides points out, it's going on in Iraq today, as the guerillas blow bridge after bridge...

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The Siege of Baghdad

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Post-traumatic Iraq syndrome
The war is lost. Americans should begin to deal with what that means.

The endgame in Iraq is now clear, in outline if not detail, and it appears that the heavily favored United States will be upset. Once support for a war is lost, it is gone for good; there is no example of a modern democracy having changed its mind once it turned against a war. So we ought to start coming to grips with the meaning of losing in Iraq.

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