Seymour Hersh, on the O’Reilly’s show (via Political Animal, emphasis added):
O’REILLY: All right. Well, the damage to the country obviously is just immeasurable. But reading your article in “The New Yorker.” I just get the feeling that the Army, when they heard about it, started action almost immediately. It wasn’t a cover-up situation. Or did I read your article wrong?
HERSH: This guy Taguba is brilliant. He could have made a living doing — it’s a credit to the Army that somebody with that kind of integrity would write this kind of — it’s 53-page report [NOTE: Full report available here.].
O’REILLY: OK, but Sanchez the commander put him in charge fairly quickly. They mobilized fairly quickly.
HERSH: No, look, I don’t want to ruin your evening, but the fact of the matter is it was the third investigation. There had been two other investigations.
One of them was done by a major general who was involved in Guantanamo, General Miller. And it’s very classified, but I can tell you that he was recommending exactly doing the kind of things that happened in that prison, basically. He wanted to cut the lines. He wanted to put the military intelligence in control of the prison.
The L.A. Times picks up on one aspect of the report which has otherwise received little attention:
A little-noticed portion of the military’s classified report on the abuse of prisoners in Iraq says that a number of jails operated by the 800th Military Police Brigade “routinely held” such prisoners “without accounting for them, knowing their identities, or even the reason for their detention.”
In one case, the report says, U.S. military police at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad shifted six to eight undocumented prisoners “around within the facility to hide them” from a visiting delegation from the International Committee of the Red Cross.
“This maneuver was deceptive, contrary to Army Doctrine and in violation of international law,” the report adds.
More on these “ghost detainees” at Billmon (via This Modern World).
