George W. Bush is so beyond the pale of rational cognition that he probably doesn't see it coming. Or, in the language of the game he allegedly loves so much, baseball--although it is very hard for me to swallow that; I've never known another baseball man I couldn't like in some fashion or another--he's looking fastball all the way, but a wicked yacker is suddenly enroute and he's frozen solid as it darts from the direction of his quivering mid-section and breaks down and away painting black and it's a called strike three.
He's in a whale of hurt, and even though a Lt. Colonel is now falling on his sword for the team over Abu Ghraib, it will not stop there:
WASHINGTON, May 17 -- The American officer who was in charge of interrogations at the Abu Ghraib prison has told a senior Army investigator that intelligence officers sometimes instructed the military police to force Iraqi detainees to strip naked and to shackle them before questioning them. But he said those measures were not imposed "unless there is some good reason."
The officer, Col. Thomas M. Pappas, commander of the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade, also told the investigator, Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba, that his unit had "no formal system in place" to monitor instructions they had given to military guards, who worked closely with interrogators to prepare detainees for interviews. Colonel Pappas said he "should have asked more questions, admittedly" about abuses committed or encouraged by his subordinates.
The statements by Colonel Pappas, contained in the transcript of a Feb. 11 interview that is part of General Taguba's 6,000-page classified report, offer the highest-level confirmation so far that military intelligence soldiers directed military guards in preparing for interrogations. They also provide the first insights by the senior intelligence officer at the prison into the relationship between his troops and the military police. Portions of Colonel Pappas's sworn statements were read to The New York Times by a government official who had read the transcript. ...
Colonel Pappas confirmed in his statements that his unit had enacted several changes recommended by Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller, the head of detention operations at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, whom the Pentagon sent to Iraq in August and September to review detention operations.
A major finding of General Miller's visit, Colonel Pappas said, was "to provide dedicated M.P.'s in support of interrogations."
Several military police officers and their commanders at Abu Ghraib have said that military intelligence officers directed them to "set the conditions" to enhance the questioning. When General Taguba asked what safeguards existed to ensure that guards "understand the instructions or limits of instructions, or whether the instructions were legal," Colonel Pappas acknowledged that there were no assurances.
"There would be no way for us to actually monitor whether that happened," Colonel Pappas told General Taguba. "We had no formal system in place to do that."
No, this is a White House-seeking missile of a scandal that, frankly, is not another Iran-Contra or even Watergate. I believe Iraqgate is worse, all of it. To this reporter's thinking, the accumulation of sins of commission and sins of omission in the entire Iraq misadventure, not just the ever-worsening prisoner-abuse scandal, will send Dubya back to sandlot ignominity come November. He will leave a legacy of such willful infamy behind him that historians will have to revisit the latter part of the 19th Century to find a worse president that George W. Bush.
Hyperbole, you say? Just another media liberal whistling past a graveyard, you think? Just Bosco being melodramatic? Nope. Read just how much trouble Shrub & Twigs are in. I have already blogged Seymour Hersh's latest taleof prisoner woe in this week's The New Yorker. And by now you know that the White House has already sicced the attack dogs on Seymour. But what are they going to do with Newsweek, which is also out with a parallel story that is independent of Seymour's work?
Now, I wish to give a tip of the keyboard to Richard at The Peking Duck for alerting us to another damaging article--actually three in one--on this story that is getting uglier by the day--where you will also find links to both the latest New Yorker article, but also the Newsweek trilogy.
I strongly urge you to visit Fred Kaplan's column at Slate; you will quickly realize just how big this scandal is and how far up the leadership chain it goes--suffice it to say, while there is no sign of it in the Oval Office, that is where this "buck" is going to stop.
Locked in Abu Ghraib The prison scandal keeps getting worse for the Bush administration.
If today's investigative shockers—Seymour Hersh's latest article in The New Yorker and a three-part piece in Newsweek—are true, it's hard to avoid concluding that responsibility for the Abu Ghraib atrocities goes straight to the top, both in the Pentagon and the White House, and that varying degrees of blame can be ascribed to officials up and down the chain of command.
