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April 23, 2005
Why Do They Hate Us; I Lost Count...
Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, faulted by some for leadership failures in the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal, has been cleared by the Army of all allegations of wrongdoing and will not be punished, officials said.
(What a coincidence that this news is released on a Friday afternoon).
I don't know what to say except that we should remember this moment the next time why we wonder why they think we are hypocrites. I don't know what else we could do to communicate to people of Iraq that we see them as less than human. If a tenth of what had been done to the torture victims in Iraq and Afghanistan had been done to American soldiers, many people would be calling for nukes. (And remember, not that you'd know by following the story from the media, that the torture scandal is far beyond the few pictures of sexual humiliation that have surfaces. Hundreds have been killed in detention, and many more mutilated, raped and subjected to extreme pain and torture.)
And Lt. Gen. Sanchez is one of the few top-brass soldiers for whom we have direct proof of his involvement in the decision-making process that encouraged, allowed and enabled the torture. Let me quote from a previous blog entry here:
And the most eggregious example in the uniformed military was Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez because cables and other materials had been unearthed which showed that he had directly authorized and ordered the use of some of the torture methods and helped run the place in a manner that allowed and encouraged the whole gamut of despicable practices.Pentagon did not make these cables public, but some appropriately disgusted government employee turned them over to the Washington Post. Let me recap the key part (I wrote more about it here):
The cable signed by Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez listed several dozen strategies for extracting information, drawn partly from what officials now say was an outdated and improperly permissive Army field manual. But it added one not previously approved for use in Iraq, under the heading of Presence of Military Working Dogs: "Exploit Arab fear of dogs while maintaining security during interrogations."And:
Unnamed officials at the Florida headquarters of the U.S. Central Command, which has overall military responsibility for Iraq, objected to some of the 32 interrogation tactics approved by Sanchez in September, including the more severe methods that he had said could be used at any time in Abu Ghraib with the consent of the interrogation officer in charge....
The high-pressure options that remained included taking someone to a less hospitable location for interrogation; manipulating his or her diet; imposing isolation for more than 30 days; using military dogs to provoke fear; and requiring someone to maintain a "stress position" for as long as 45 minutes. These were not dropped by Sanchez until a scandal erupted in May over photographs depicting abuse at the prison.
Someone should remind these people that just because we here seem so resolute in not noticing this massive cover-up, it doesn't mean the rest of the world is also not noticing it.
Posted by zeynep at April 23, 2005 10:09 AM
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Tracked on April 25, 2005 02:36 PM