Where's the outrage on torture?
by Jeff Jacoby, Boston Globe Columnist
(First of two columns)
March 17, 2005
IN AUGUST 2003, when he was commander of the military base at Guantanamo Bay, Major General Geoffrey Miller visited Baghdad with some advice for US interrogators at Abu Ghraib prison. As Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, the military police commander in Iraq, later recalled it, Miller's bottom line was blunt: Abu Ghraib should be ''Gitmo-ized" -- Iraqi detainees should be exposed to the same aggressive techniques being used to extract information from prisoners in Guantanamo.
''You have to have full control," Karpinski quoted Miller as saying. There can be ''no mistake about who's in charge. You have to treat these detainees like dogs."
Whether or not Miller actually spoke those words, it is clear that harsh techniques authorized for a time in Guantanamo -- forced nudity, hooding, shackling men in ''stress positions," the use of dogs -- were taken up in Afghanistan and Iraq, where they sometimes degenerated into outright viciousness and even torture. Did the injunction to ''treat these detainees like dogs" give rise to a prison culture that winked at barbarism? Should Miller be held responsible for what Abu Ghraib became? [...] Read more at: http://tinyurl.com/3ow5r The American Progress Action web site has an excellent article on "FCC's Reruns" which gives insight into what is to be expected from President Bush's nominee for FCC chairman. Read it at: http://tinyurl.com/5bo89
© Virginia Metze
(First of two columns)
March 17, 2005
IN AUGUST 2003, when he was commander of the military base at Guantanamo Bay, Major General Geoffrey Miller visited Baghdad with some advice for US interrogators at Abu Ghraib prison. As Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, the military police commander in Iraq, later recalled it, Miller's bottom line was blunt: Abu Ghraib should be ''Gitmo-ized" -- Iraqi detainees should be exposed to the same aggressive techniques being used to extract information from prisoners in Guantanamo.
''You have to have full control," Karpinski quoted Miller as saying. There can be ''no mistake about who's in charge. You have to treat these detainees like dogs."
Whether or not Miller actually spoke those words, it is clear that harsh techniques authorized for a time in Guantanamo -- forced nudity, hooding, shackling men in ''stress positions," the use of dogs -- were taken up in Afghanistan and Iraq, where they sometimes degenerated into outright viciousness and even torture. Did the injunction to ''treat these detainees like dogs" give rise to a prison culture that winked at barbarism? Should Miller be held responsible for what Abu Ghraib became? [...] Read more at: http://tinyurl.com/3ow5r The American Progress Action web site has an excellent article on "FCC's Reruns" which gives insight into what is to be expected from President Bush's nominee for FCC chairman. Read it at: http://tinyurl.com/5bo89
© Virginia Metze
Starmail - 20. Mrz, 22:51
