More on Abu Ghraib (in no particular order):
Bush has created what is in effect a gulag. It stretches from prisons in Afghanistan to Iraq, from Guantánamo to secret CIA prisons around the world. There are perhaps 10,000 people being held in Iraq, 1,000 in Afghanistan and almost 700 in Guantánamo, but no one knows the exact numbers. The law as it applies to them is whatever the executive deems necessary. There has been nothing like this system since the fall of the Soviet Union.
… “This is the only one where they took pictures,” Tom Malinowski, Washington advocate of Human Rights Watch, and a former staff member of the National Security Council, told me. “This was not considered a debatable topic until people had to stare at the pictures.”
I don’t know what the Administration was thinking when they appointed John Negroponte, infamous for his role in Honduras in the 80s, as the ambassador to the new Iraq. I don’t know what they thought he could accomplish.
U.S. soldiers who detained an elderly Iraqi woman last year placed a harness on her, made her crawl on all fours and rode her like a donkey, Prime Minister Tony Blair’s personal human rights envoy to Iraq said Wednesday.
The New York Times:
More than two months after a classified Army report found that two contract workers were implicated in the abuse of Iraqis at a prison outside Baghdad, the companies that employ them say that they have heard nothing from the Pentagon, and that they have not removed any employees from Iraq.
More on that story from the Boston Globe.
The head of a U.S. military police unit at Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib prison is under investigation following charges he secretly photographed naked female American soldiers, officials said on Wednesday.
Also from Reuters:
Two Iraqi prisoners were murdered by Americans and 23 other deaths are being investigated in Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States revealed on Tuesday as the Bush administration tried to contain growing outrage over the abuse of Iraqi detainees. [Some of these links are from
