Bloggerheads

Independent – Green light for Iraqi prison abuse came right from the top: America’s leading civil liberties group has demanded an investigation into the former US military commander Iraq after a formerly classified memo revealed that he personally sanctioned a series of coercive interrogation techniques outlawed by the Geneva Conventions. The group claims that his directives were directly linked to the sort of abuses that took place at Abu Ghraib. Documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) reveal that Lt General Ricardo Sanchez authorised techniques such as the use of dogs to intimidate prisoners, stress positions and disorientation. In the documents, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, Gen Sanchez admits that some of the techniques would not be tolerated by other countries. When he appeared last year before a Congressional committee, Gen Sanchez denied authorising such techniques. He has now been accused of perjury.

ACLU – Army Memo Released By ACLU Suggests Perjury In Lt. Gen. Sanchez Sworn Testimony on Torture: “Lt. Gen. Sanchez’s testimony, given under oath before the Senate Armed Services committee, is utterly inconsistent with the written record, and deserves serious investigation,” said Anthony D. Romero, ACLU Executive Director. “This clear breach of the public’s trust is also further proof that the American people deserve the appointment of an independent special counsel by the attorney general.” Although the Washington Post first disclosed its existence, the memorandum at issue was initially withheld from public release by the Defense Department under national security grounds. The ACLU obtained a physical copy of the memorandum, however, under an ongoing Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, and released a hard copy on Tuesday. The memorandum, dated September 14, 2003, was signed by Lt. Gen. Sanchez and laid out specific interrogation techniques, modeled on those used against detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, for use by coalition forces in Iraq. These include sleep “management,” the inducement of fear at two levels of severity, loud music and sensory agitation, and the use of canine units to “exploit [the] Arab fear of dogs.” During sworn testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Lt. Gen. Sanchez flatly denied approving any such techniques in Iraq, and said that a news article reporting otherwise was false.

Keep telling yourself that a few misguided grunts were to blame…

Related link: Something Funny Happened On The Way To Abu Ghraib

Oh, come *on* people! We’ll get nowhere if we continue to kick this issue around. It’s time to draw a line under it and move on, etc. etc. etc…

DailyKos – Malnutrition has doubled in Iraqi children: While George W. Bush was frantically fighting to keep one woman’s feeding tube in place, the war that he started has doubled the rate of malnutrition in Iraqi children.

This post also cites a Lancet report stating that – out of the civilians who died during our little adventure – not all of them got shot or blowed up: Most died as a result of the violence, but many others died as a result of the increasingly difficult living conditions, reflected in increasing child mortality levels.

Perhaps we can send them our Turkey Twizzlers.

Washington Post – Data on Iraqi Arms Flawed, Panel Says: U.S. intelligence agencies were “dead wrong” in their prewar assessments of Iraq’s nuclear, biological and chemical weapons and today know “disturbingly little” about the capabilities and intentions of other potential adversaries such as Iran and North Korea, a presidential commission reported yesterday. While praising intelligence successes in Libya and Pakistan, the commission’s report offered a withering critique of the government’s collection of information leading to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, calling its data “either worthless or misleading” and its analysis “riddled with errors.” That resulted in one of the “most damaging intelligence failures in recent American history.”… Yet while unstinting in its appraisal of intelligence agencies, the panel that Bush appointed under pressure in February 2004 said it was “not authorized” to explore the question of how the commander in chief used the faulty information to make perhaps the most critical decision of his presidency. As he accepted the report yesterday, Bush offered no thoughts about relying on flawed intelligence to launch a war and took no questions from reporters…. The nine-member panel, officially called the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction, blamed intelligence agencies for overselling their knowledge and not disclosing conflicting information to policymakers. At the same time, it exonerated Bush and Vice President Cheney from allegations of pressuring analysts to conclude that Iraq was developing weapons of mass destruction. “The analysts who worked Iraqi weapons issues universally agreed that in no instance did political pressure cause them to skew or alter any of their analytical judgments,” the commission said. “That said, it is hard to deny the conclusion that intelligence analysts worked in an environment that did not encourage skepticism about the conventional wisdom.”

This all seems terribly familiar. A deliberately blinkered remit, the vague suggestion of subconscious influence…

Ben Russell sees things differently, but mainly because he focuses on the savaging the intelligence services got (he does get there in the final paragraphs, which I’ve included here)…

Independent – Two nations, two reports, two very different languages: The contrast between the language in the Presidential Commission report on intelligence and the British inquiries into the run-up to war in Iraq could not be starker. From the first paragraph of the 618-page report, the 10 members of the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States cut to the chase in words a world away from those in the Butler and Hutton reports. Where Lord Butler found that “validation of human intelligence sources after the war has thrown doubt on a high proportion of those sources and their reports”, the US Commission said the intelligence community was “dead wrong in almost all of its pre-war judgements”…. The Commission insisted that it was “not authorised to investigate how policymakers used the intelligence assessments they received”. That echoed a complaint about Lord Butler’s inquiry, which was not charged with looking at the use of intelligence by politicians, although it did criticise the decision to remove caveats from the intelligence judgements presented in the Government’s dossier on Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction.

So there you have it. The buck stops… somewhere over there. Again.

An important thing to remember about this is that Mr “darn good intelligence” was warned that this intelligence was often unreliable or downright false, but this conflicted with his agenda so he chose to ignore those warnings.

Something else that’s important about this commission may have slipped your mind. Blair bent over backwards (or forwards, depending on your view) to appease Bush… but the moment things got awkward, Bush dumped him in it without hesitation…

Guardian – Blair alone after Bush WMD move