Friday, May 21, 2004
Ok, this is getting really, really interesting now.
New front in Iraq detainee abuse scandal?
By Campbell Brown
Correspondent
NBC News
Updated: 8:10 p.m. ET May 20, 2004 BAGHDAD - With attention focused on the seven soldiers charged with abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison, U.S. military and intelligence officials familiar with the situation tell NBC News the Army’s elite Delta Force is now the subject of a Pentagon inspector general investigation into abuse against detainees.
The target is a top-secret site near Baghdad’s airport. The battlefield interrogation facility known as the “BIF” is pictured in satellite photos.
According to two top U.S. government sources, it is the scene of the most egregious violations of the Geneva Conventions in all of Iraq’s prisons. A place where the normal rules of interrogation don’t apply, Delta Force’s BIF only holds Iraqi insurgents and suspected terrorists — but not the most wanted among Saddam’s lieutenants pictured on the deck of cards.
These sources say the prisoners there are hooded from the moment they are captured. They are kept in tiny dark cells. And in the BIF’s six interrogation rooms, Delta Force soldiers routinely drug prisoners, hold a prisoner under water until he thinks he’s drowning, or smother them almost to suffocation.
In Washington Thursday evening, a senior Pentagon official denied allegations of prisoner abuse at Battlefield Interrogation Facilities operated by Delta Force in Iraq. And he said the tactics described in this report are not used in those facilities...
Between this, the previous article on a Sergeant claiming military intelligence was directing the abuses, and the Hersh report, I think it's fairly safe to say that the Bush Administration's party line of "a few soldiers who went out of control," is starting to look less and less pristine. And it's early yet. Every day it seems more information gets out, and more people are speaking up.
The story is starting to snowball, and the Administration - whose fatal mistake was never grabbing control of the story in the first place - is going to start looking awfully sheepish. Officials all the way up to President Bush have stated on the record repeatedly that this was a small group of bad-apple soldiers, nothing more. If that turns out to be a lie, it will be a massive breach of trust, one the President doesn't need six months before the election.
Unlike the ironclad nature of the Bush Administration throughout the first half of his term, there now appear to be innumerable fractures. The military, intelligence community, and civilian policymakers (read: Neocons) are NOT on the same page, and President Bush has been remarkably coy throughout the maelstrom. A dysfunctional bureaucracy is the last thing America needs going into what is sure to be a tumultuous handover of power in Iraq. At the same time, the splintered nature of the Administration is going to make it that much harder to put a tourniquet on the scandals.
However the abuse scandal pans out, there are going to be serious domestic and international ramifications. I have to wonder how badly our international standing has been/is going to be set back; how does America intervene anywhere, after this? Sooner or later, I think Secretary Rumsfeld is going to have to go. We'll see.
As a final note, some of the most graphic descriptions of the abuses to date have surfaced. Viewer discretion advised.
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