Joshua Micah Marshall notes that:
Posted by DeLong at May 7, 2004 07:41 AM | TrackBack | | Other weblogs commenting on this postTalking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah Marshall: May 02, 2004 - May 08, 2004 Archives: From an article in the Post: "Some U.S. officials said Rumsfeld was resistant to repeated warnings from Iraq governor L. Paul Bremer -- delivered as early as last fall -- that the United States was detaining too many Iraqis for too long and in poor conditions. Bremer told Rumsfeld and other senior administration officials that if the problem persisted, the political fallout in Iraq would be serious, the officials said."
And following up on Thursday's post about the prohibitive political costs of canning Rumsfeld, this from the same article in the Post: "A White House official said that it is the view of a number of people close to Bush that getting rid of Rumsfeld would be 'a self-inflicted political and policy wound disproportionate to the secretary's responsibility for this human failure on the part of a small number of soldiers.'"
Finally, the same Post article suggests something I'd heard from a source on Wednesday: that the Miller report from last October -- the one that seemed to recommend more Gitmo-style rules for interrogations and imprisonment in Iraq -- was itself ordered because of reports of problems with the detention of prisoners in the country. As for myself, I still have some question whether Miller was sent out there -- remember he went in August and September -- because the insurgency was heating up at the time and it was felt that ... well, more needed to be done.
When it comes down to it, I think that the dispatching of Geoffrey Miller to Iraq last August, to serve as a kind of prison consultant, is going to be a linchpin in this story. I want to know who took the decision to send Miller, and why: Miller, the Gitmo Grand Inquisitor, a torture bureaucrat whose recommendations on Iraq would have been entirely predictable, and whose rules are precisely the ones that were in operation during the worst period at Abu Ghraib. I don't remotely believe Miller was sent in to correct abuses in the Iraq gulag—I think he was sent in to rationalize and formalize a policy of abuse, and I want to know how high up the responsibility for his assignment goes.
Posted by: Michael on May 7, 2004 08:21 AMThe specific order was probably Rumsfield;
the responsibility, of course, is Bush's.
It will be interesting seeing how far the investigations go. But let's be real, you won't find the root cause looking into memos or reports in 2003. It goes deeper. Perhaps Brad, with his Clinton administration connections, might be able to find some hints as to when it started.
Human Rights groups first documented these kind of actions, and worse, in late 2001 in Afghanistan. And have been consistently documenting them ever since in Afghanistan, Gitmo, and (since May 2003) Iraq.
There is no abberation or recent change of direction. This is American s.o.p. today.
It's tempting to put all of the blame on the Bush administration, but the first hints of abuses occuring came from human rights reports in Kosovo after the bombing ended and US bases were established. However, there were NOT reports of such abuses, except in isolation, in Gulf War I or Panama in 1989.
My guess is that because Clinton had no credibility with the military he kept them at arms length, and in the process interrogation discipline began to break down. Enter the neocons and their ideology, including the reliance on contractors and disdain for international law, and the result is what we see today.
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