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BAGHDAD: American forces have agreed to hand over control of the infamous Abu Ghraib prison to the newly elected Iraqi authorities in an attempt to draw a line under one of the most shameful episodes of the Iraq war. Iraq's human rights minister, Bakhtiar Amin, yesterday told the Guardian that the US had agreed to the pullout at the four main detention facilities, including Abu Ghraib, west of Baghdad, the prison at the centre of the abuse and torture scandal. Two other locations in the centre of Iraq and a British run prison in the south will also be handed...

At Abu Ghraib, Armin Cruz handcuffed defenseless Iraqi men together in a sexually humiliating embrace. He put his foot on their backsides and pushed, to simulate homosexual thrusting. He forced them to low-crawl across a cement floor, scraping their genitals until it hurt. In Plano, he was an after-school counselor at Christie Elementary School. He was known to sprawl on the floor with kids for hours, helping with homework, coloring pictures, playing cards. He was gentle, his co-workers say, and patient. Mr. Cruz, a military intelligence analyst and 24-year-old college student from Plano, was sentenced in September to eight months...

An Army intelligence sergeant who accused fellow soldiers in Samarra, Iraq, of abusing detainees in 2003 was in turn accused by his commander of being delusional and ordered to undergo a psychiatric evaluation in Germany, despite a military psychiatrist's initial judgment that the man was stable, according to internal Army records released yesterday. The soldier had angered his commander by urging the unit's redeployment from the military base to prevent what the soldier feared would be the death of one or more detainees under interrogation, according to the documents. He told his commander three members of the counterintelligence team had...

CRITICIZE LAWYERS' PROSE all you want, but some court documents are hot, aren't they? In the following passage from a notorious current case, the language may be stiff, but you just know that steamy details are coming: Defendants intended to, and did, cause offensive sexual contacts with intimate parts of another, including but not limited to Plaintiffs. Defendants acted to cause Plaintiffs' imminent apprehension of harmful and offensive contact with their intimate parts. We're talking about Michael Jackson and his flunkies, right? Wrong. It's about Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his flunkies. A hard look at allegations in the...

The election in Iraq has done to some on the anti-war left what the revelations of torture in Abu Ghraib prison did to others on the hawkish right. Mark Brown wonders aloud in the pages of the Chicago Sun-Times: What if Bush has been right about Iraq all along? The Daily Show's Jon Stewart said something similar to Fareed Zakaria. "What if Bush, the president, ours, has been right about this all along? I feel like my world view will not sustain itself and I may, and again I don't know if I can physically do this, implode." Richard Gwyn...

19 Feb 2005 00:29:16 GMT FORT HOOD, Texas, Feb 18 (Reuters) - Military prosecutors have filed new charges that greatly reduce the amount of jail time facing U.S. Army reservist Lynndie England if she is convicted in the abuse scandal at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison. A spokesman at Fort Hood in central Texas where England is to be court martialed said on Friday the new charges, nine in all ranging from cruelty to committing indecent acts, would expose her to a maximum of 16 years in prison. They were filed last week, but not made public. Previously, she faced 19...

The results of an Army probe of the photographs were among hundreds of pages of documents released after the ACLU obtained a federal court order in Manhattan to let it see documents about U.S. treatment of detainees around the world. The ACLU said the probe shows the rippling effect of the Abu Ghraib scandal and that efforts to humiliate the enemy might have been more widespread than thought. "It's increasingly clear that members of the military were aware of the allegations of torture and that efforts were taken to erase evidence, to shut down investigations and to humiliate the...

The opposition to the President’s nomination of Alberto R. Gonzales as Attorney General focused the attention of Congress, and America, on allegations that Mr. Gonzales’ authored an advisory memorandum for the president that at least implicitly approved the torture of prisoners in the War on Terror for the purpose of obtaining information. The broad claims of Democrats who opposed his nomination were that any opinion supporting the use of psychological or physical pain or duress for the purpose of eliciting information from a prisoner, or detainee, i.e., torture, mild or severe, is wrong, and should have disqualified Mr. Gonzales from...

FORT BUCHANAN, Puerto Rico - (KRT) - After taking over for the guards at the center of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, Army Sgt. Jaime Rodriguez says he can understand how things went wrong. "I don't blame those guys," said Rodriguez, whose island-based unit returned to Puerto Rico on Wednesday. "It was crazy. There weren't that many of us, and there was a whole bunch of them. "They should have known right from wrong. But when we got there, we were dealing with 12-hour shifts, we didn't have that much personnel, and at the beginning we didn't get too much...

An attorney for a U.S. Army soldier court-martialed in connection with the Abu Ghraib prison scandal says he's frustrated that he was not allowed in court to try to link the prison abuse to top-ranked military officials, including the incoming Fort Huachuca commander. Paul Bergrin, a New Jersey lawyer, said Monday that he will press his efforts to link the scandal with higher-ups to the Court of Military Review and, if necessary, the Court of Military Appeals. His client, Sgt. Javal S. Davis of Roselle, N.J., pleaded guilty to dereliction of duty, lying to investigators and battery last Tuesday as...

Judge lets her go to Iraq to find witnesses; he also drops some counts in Abu Ghraib case FORT HOOD -- A female soldier accused in the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal won't be tried on indecency charges and will be allowed to return to Iraq to locate potentially supportive witnesses, a military judge ruled Saturday. Spc. Sabrina Harman, 26, of Lorton, Va., was told to be ready for court-martial on March 7, when the government will prosecute her for conspiring to hurt and mistreat detainees. She took and appeared in several photographs that documented the abuses. The allegations carry...

Howdy, I was in my local Barnes and Nobles yesterday and noticed a large black book (approx 1000 pages) titled "The Torture Papers" written by a Karen Greenberg and a Joshua Dratel (not names that I recognized). I did a goodle search on Greenberg and discovered that she has published a couple of times in the American Prospect and has this "37 questions for Donald Rumsfeld" all over the net. The only blurb on the back cover that I recognized was by Michael Ratner. I flipped through the book and it appears that it contains docs that look legit (on...

As the Senate Judiciary Committee voted today on the nomination of Alberto Gonzales for Attorney General, we hear a speech by investigative reporter Seymour Hersh on torture from Guantanamo to Abu Gharib to Vietnam.Hersh is the author of 'Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Gharib.' He spoke last month at the Wise Free Synagogue in New York.'The amazing thing is that we have been taken over by a cult of eight or nine neo-conservatives that have somehow grapped the government.' 'Just how and why they did it so efficiently, we will have to wait for much later...

Jan. 20, 2005 — Spc. Sabrina Harman, one of seven Army Reservists charged in the abuse of prisoners in Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison, told "20/20" she wishes she could apologize to the Iraqi people, but doesn't think she did anything wrong while she was stationed as a guard at the prison. Photos of prisoners shown stripped naked, piled atop one another, being humiliated and abused, shocked the world and drew international condemnation. Harman, 27, said she never hurt anyone, but she was involved with some of the prison scandal's most iconic photos. In one of those photos, Harman is seen...

US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld cancelled a planned visit to Germany after a US human rights organisation asked German authorities to prosecute him for war crimes, Deutsche Presse-Agentur (dpa) has learned. Rumsfeld has informed the German government via the US embassy that he will not take part in the Munich Security Conference in February, conference head Horst Teltschik told dpa on Thursday. The New York-based Centre for Constitutional Rights filed a complaint in December with the Federal German Prosecutor's Office against Rumsfeld accusing him of war crimes and torture in connection with detainee abuses at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison. Rumsfeld...

I watch in amazement, as Liberals in America once again call upon our government to “pull-out” of Iraq, leaving the Iraqi people to fend off terrorists on their own and I can’t help but notice the hypocrisy and ignorance of history in their chant… I thought liberals were the kinder, gentler Americans, always concerned with standing up for the down-trodden, looking after those in the world who are unable to care for or defend themselves? It appears their humanitarian zeal includes whales and seals, but not the people of Iraq… Though seemingly appalled at the abusive acts of a few...

Denis Boyles is a must read to follow the ongoing hypocrisy of our "allies" in Europe. He is also wicked funny.

Remember how that OLC memo was supposed to have led inexorably to the abuses of the likes of Charles Graner at Abu Ghraib? Well, presumably some evidence of that would have been introduced by his defense at his trail. But this is how the Times reports it today: His lawyers have argued that Specialist Graner, a 36-year-old former prison guard from Pennsylvania, was following orders to "soften up" detainees before interrogations. But on cross-examination, witnesses called by the defense on Wednesday and Thursday almost all ended up reinforcing the prosecution's case that Specialist Graner had abused detainees for sport. There...

Pardon Graner Now that the media has inundated the world with all the sordid images and details of the "Abu Ghraib Prison Abuse Scandal", and now that Spc. Charles Graner has been found guilty of these so-called "abuses", we should all feel better, right? After all, America has done all she can to prove to the Arab street just how sensitive and caring she is, right? Pardon my French, but this is a bunch of BS! I don't know what kind of goods we're being sold, but I ain't buying and neither should you. War is hell and bad things...

The Bush administration has been carrying out secret reconnaissance missions to learn about nuclear, chemical and missile sites in Iran in preparation for possible airstrikes there, journalist Seymour Hersh said Sunday. The effort has been under way at least since last summer, Hersh said on CNN's "Late Edition." In an interview on the same program, White House Communications Director Dan Bartlett said the story was "riddled with inaccuracies." "I don't believe that some of the conclusions he's drawing are based on fact," Bartlett said. He said his information on Iran came from "inside" sources who divulged it in the hope...