Published on Monday, May 3, 2004 by The Nation
Torture at Abu Ghraib
by Katrina vanden Heuvel

The shocking photos of US soldiers torturing Iraqis detainees shown last Wednesday on CBS's Sixty Minutes II provoked immediate international outrage. Now, veteran American investigative journalist Seymour Hersh's explosive article in the current issue of the New Yorker, "Torture at Abu Ghraib," details a secret fifty-three page Army report which documents systemic and illegal abuse of Iraqi prisoners in US custody. Acording to Major General Antonio Taguba's internal report, "Sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses"--including burning detainees with phosphoric liquid, brutal beatings and the sodomising of one detainee with a chemical light or a broom stick--date back to the previous October.

The report, according to Hersh, "amounts to an unsparing study of collective wrongdoing and the failure of Army leadership at the highest levels. The picture he [Taguba] draws of Abu Ghraib is one in which Army regulations and the Geneva conventions were routinely violated, and in which much of the day-to- day management of the prisoners was abdicated to Army military-intelligence units and civilian contract employees."

The revelations have led Amnesty International and other human rights and Iraqi groups to call for an independent investigation into what Amnesty is describing as a "pattern of torture."

In an exchange with CNN's Wolf Blitzer Sunday morning, Hersh talked about the Taguba Report and the responsibility of the military-intelligence officers and private contractors assigned to Abu Ghraib. He also expressed outrage that Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Richard Myers told CBS's Face the Nation that he hasn't even read the internal Army report. Click here to read the full transcript of the CNN conversation. P.S. Notice Blitzer's lack of interest in pursuing Hersh's statement that we should get out of Iraq.

Copyright © 2004 The Nation