Courts Martial as Cover Up

For the first time, I’m going to write a piece here that is not a commentary on a particular story but on the overall situation with the courts martial about to start in Iraq. Friday’s newspapers and media clearly set the stage for an information war about the shape of the “Iraq Prison Abuse” scandal, which I personally think of as more of an American Gulag scandal. I’d be gratified if everyone read this analysis and discussed it via comments.

Leaks to the media of documents and even photos are now occurring at a rapid rate, as illustrated by the fact for Friday both the New York Times and the Washington Post have one statement and one only, from a soldier named Sivits who was a participant in torture visited on a small group of Iraqi prisoners. This, not coincidentally, is the same torture incident chronicled in the photos shown on 60 Minutes II by CBS on April 28. Sivits was witness to other incidents of torture as well but the two newspapers were selectively leaked only the account of the one incident that the court martial trials are all related to. Simultaneously, various tawdry details of Pvt. England’s personal life are being trotted around the world for everyone to read, although they are utterly irrelevant to the facts of torture in Iraq and who ordered it. There is a specific reason for this selective leaking.
The strategy of the civilians in the Pentagon since the official discovery of photographs of torture on 12 January of this year has been to contain the scandal to a small number of people, namely those who were involved in the single torture incident that produced 11 of the 13 photographs shown on 60 Minutes II, which broke the scandal to the world. This flies in the face of the classified but leaked official investigation which began with the discovery of the cd-rom that included those photos, and the reporting by Seymour Hersh of the New Yorker which convincingly shows that there were other incidents of torture not involving this group of MPs, and involving several Military Intelligence soldiers instead, in Abu Ghraib. In addition there is at least one story of a CIA murder in Abu Ghraib and a published photo of the victim’s body. There are at least three other very important photographs published, one in the Washington Post, one in the New Yorker, and one by MSNBC on Thursday night, which show torture being conducted by persons not charged in the court martial trials, or otherwise disciplined by the Army. Why, despite this investigation (by General Antonio Taguba), which points the finger at Military Intelligence officers and mercenaries, are all of the prosecutions only directed at enlisted personnel and non-coms? Because the incident described in Sivits’ statement, which produced so many of the most famous and jarring photos of “humiliation,” was in fact an extracurricular activity, not part of the interrogation process at Abu Ghraib. Two of the victims in this incident have been located and interviewed recently,
one by the Washington Post and one by the New York Times, and both of them say that the torture and beatings that particular that night were given out as a form of punishment for fighting not interrogation, and that in fact they were never subsequently interrogated at all. Since only enlisted personnel and a sergeant named Graner are known to be involved, and the majority of the CBS pictures depict only scenes from the same event, there is a concerted attempt to use this as “proof” that any torture whatever in Abu Ghraib was “rogue” activity by a “few bad eggs” that were investigated and punished. This is a Rove-worthy deliberate attempt to divert and cover up from the facts that Military Intelligence officers and civilian “contractors” were directing torture on a wide scale, as concluded in Gen. Taguba’s report, which cited “grave breaches of international law.”