Pentagon Report On Guantanamo Destroys The "Few Bad Apples" Defense

by Steve

Well, here’s a story that the White House will try and bury over the next several days while we focus on Rove and Plame. Remember the White House line that the Abu Ghraib war crimes were not the result of a systematic approach to interrogation that condoned and required questionable acts, but rather the acts of bad apples without proper supervision at the facility?

A just-released Pentagon report forever destroys the White House’s argument, and instead shows that the tactics used at Abu Ghraib weren't isolated to that facility, but in fact were field-tested months earlier at Guantanamo with Rumsfeld’s and Alberto Gonzales’s support. So we have confirmation that the tactics that Major General Geoffrey Miller instituted against Iraqi civilians at Abu Ghraib were in fact first put into use months before as standard Bush Administration operating procedure.

And when given the chance to hold Miller accountable for implementing a program that could land him and his superiors in the docks at The Hague, the military brass punted.

Look, it is one thing in the aftermath of 9/11 to use such tactics against Taliban and suspected Al Qaeda operatives as an outgrowth of the Afghanistan war and our anti-terror efforts. It is another thing altogether to think that those same tactics are morally and legally transferable for use against Iraqi civilians during an occupation.