High-Ranking Intelligence Officer Ordered Dogs Used on Iraqi Prisoners

This comes from interviews that are part of the 2000 “missing pages” of the Taguba Report. So Taguba reported from the beginning that top officers ordered dogs used on prisoners. No one was ever charged for this despite photos such as these, taken in a bloody dog attack on a prisoner (12-12-03) that even involved 3 of the 7 MPs subsequently charged with acts of “degradation” and “humiliation” in a different incident. Why were the 3 MPs (as well as the dog handlers) not charged over the dog attack? One reason is that the non-MP Army dog handlers involved had been directly authorized by Pappas himself to use dogs on prisoners, and this would have come out in a court martial. The other reason might be this:

As reported in Thursday’s Wall Street Journal, Donald Rumsfeld had approved the use of dogs in interrogation, in writing, in December 2002, a fact proven in a January 9, 2003 memo obtained by the paper. He was approving a request by General Geoffrey Miller, then head of Guantanamo, who months later in Sept. 2003 “urged” the use of “unmuzzled dogs” against prisoners at Abu Ghraib, in a report that is the main chunk of the 2000 “missing pages” Rumsfeld won’t give to Congress (Taguba had attached Miller’s report suggesting new techniques at Abu Ghraib to his own report as evidence that Miller was “directly and indirectly responsible” for mistreatment of prisoners at AG). Miller is also Military Intelligence and closely connected to Pappas. On Nov. 19th 2003 Pappas’ MI unit was put in charge of Abu Ghraib; Taguba’s report showed that December and January was the peak time period of dog use against prisoners. Taguba was called in to begin his investigation that same month after a Private was shocked by torture photos given to him and turned them over to CID (military police detectives, as opposed to so-called Military Intelligence). Taguba’s resulting report of March 3 2004, rather than triggering the MI investigation that he urgently warned was necessary to make the torture stop, was responded to with a full-scale coverup, and now we know why. Rumsfeld not only refused to investigate the MI wrongdoing; he instead appointed Miller to take over Abu Ghraib, just before the scandal broke on CBS and in the New Yorker.