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Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other senior U.S. officials share much of the blame for detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, according to portions of a report released on Thursday by the Senate Armed Services Committee. The report's executive summary, made public by the committee's Democratic chairman Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan and its top Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona, said Rumsfeld contributed to the abuse by authorizing aggressive interrogation techniques at Guantanamo Bay on Dec. 2, 2002.

BAGHDAD — For years, the western Baghdad District of Abu Ghraib has been synonymous with violence and unrest. Tales of prisoner abuse, convoy ambushes and Soldiers missing in action were associated with the small Baghdad suburb. With the security situation becoming more stable in Baghdad and the surrounding areas, and the Iraqi security forces assuming more security responsibility each week, efforts to improve and revitalize areas such as Abu Ghraib are now starting to move forward. Local tribal and religious leaders, along with Government of Iraq, Iraqi security forces and Multi-National Division – Baghdad leaders, gathered to celebrate one such...

A recently released propaganda video by the Islamic extremist group Hizb ut-Tahrir is quite revealing. Not only does the video demonstrate the group’s growing effort to package arguments in a manner designed to appeal to Westerners on the political left, but it also serves as a barometer of radical Muslim groups’ broader shift in rhetorical strategy. The video, “Iraq: Past and Present Colonialism,” appears for the first twenty-seven minutes to be a standard leftist critique of the Iraq war, indistinguishable from Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11. The slickly-produced video begins with the history of past colonialism in Iraq—including the Mongol conquest...

Thirteen East Bay priests, rabbis and ministers asked Congressional leaders from California on Wednesday to urge President-elect Barack Obama to ban the use of torture by U.S. agencies as one of his first acts in office.Meeting with the top staff of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Sen. Dianne Feinstein in San Francisco, the group of pastors also asked them to form a Select Committee of Congress to investigate the use of torture by the U.S. government during the past seven years. "It's with that sense of new possibility with the new administration coming in," said the Rev. Karen Stokes of...

NEW YORK — A man was sentenced to five years in prison on Friday for conspiring to blow up a busy Manhattan subway station. James Elshafay, had pleaded guilty and testified against the mastermind of the plot, Shahawar Matin Siraj, at a trial last year in federal court in Brooklyn. Elshafay, the son of an Egyptian father and Irish mother, testified that after meeting Siraj at an Islamic bookstore, they hatched an initial scheme — later abandoned — to blow up the four bridges connecting Staten Island to Brooklyn and New Jersey. He also told jurors at Siraj's trial that...

On Evil Bethany Stotts, June 23, 2008 Is evil the result of human choice or manufactured by social circumstances? Professor Philip Zimbardo, known for his infamous Stanford Prison Experiment of 1971, opted for the latter explanation at a recent CATO book forum. Zimbardo told the audience that he believes Lucifer was expelled from heaven not for sinning, but for disobeying an authority figure. “It’s really a story about what happens when you challenge authority—you go to hell,” said the Stanford University professor. The author of The Lucifer Effect, Zimbardo believes that any person has the capacity for terrible deeds, torture,...

WASHINGTON — The Army general who led the investigation into prisoner abuse at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison accused the Bush administration Wednesday of committing "war crimes" and called for those responsible to be held to account. The remarks by Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba, who's now retired, came in a new report that found that U.S. personnel tortured and abused detainees in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, using beatings, electrical shocks, sexual humiliation and other cruel practices. "After years of disclosures by government investigations, media accounts and reports from human rights organizations, there is no longer any doubt as to...

he two-star general who led an Army investigation into the horrific detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib has accused the Bush administration of war crimes and is calling for accountability. In his 2004 report on Abu Ghraib, then-Major General Anthony Taguba concluded that "numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses were inflicted on several detainees." He called the abuse "systemic and illegal." And, as Seymour M. Hersh reported in the New Yorker, he was rewarded for his honesty by being forced into retirement. Now, in a preface to a Physicians for Human Rights report based on medical examinations of...

Stone took over a military detention system in April 2007 that was known mainly by the legacy of abuse at Abu Ghraib, the notorious prison west of Baghdad that was given back to the Iraqis in 2006. The detention facilities had become a breeding ground for extremism, hardening the radical beliefs of those held, U.S. officials have acknowledged. But under Stone, the military’s new focus on counter-insurgency operations was brought to the detention system, said Gen. David Petraeus, commander of U.S. forces in Iraq. "[Stone] revolutionized the way we perform detainee operations in Iraq,""Petraeus said. Calling Stone a man of...

WASHINGTON, June 2, 2008 – Four years ago, Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison was center-stage amid allegations of detainee abuse, and coalition forces suddenly cast as conquerors instead of liberators, losing the trust of the Iraqi people. Video Conscientious decisions and new detainee programs have helped the coalition turn the corner on the road to regaining that lost trust, Multinational Force Iraq’s commander of detainee operations said yesterday in a Baghdad news conference. “Today, we are still trying to regain that trust, and I want to tell you once again there was no justification for what happened at Abu Ghraib,”...

Unfriendly Fire From Left by: Malcolm A. Kline, May 13, 2008 In World War II and even into the Cold War, academics, journalists and politicians tempered their criticism of American foreign policy with a concern for U. S. troops serving in harms way. Sixty years later, men and women in U. S. military combat fatigues can count on no such sympathy from American elites. This treatment is on vivid display in the new book Party of Defeat: How Democrats and Radicals Undermined America’s War on Terror Before and After 9-11 by David Horowitz and Ben Johnson. Perhaps not too surprisingly,...

An Iraqi man sued two U.S. military contractors Monday, claiming he was repeatedly tortured while being held at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison for more than 10 months. Emad al-Janabi's federal lawsuit, filed in Los Angeles, claims that employees of CACI International Inc. and L-3 Communications Holdings Inc. punched him, slammed him into walls, hung him from a bed frame and kept him naked and handcuffed in his cell beginning in September 2003. Also named as a defendant is CACI interrogator Steven Stefanowicz, known as "Big Steve." The suit claims he directed some of the torture tactics. Phone messages left...

Of Georgetown Law and Abu Ghraib by: Malcolm A. Kline, April 14, 2008 A gathering of academics and human rights activists at Georgetown Law last week delivered some predictable broadsides at the Bush regime but also some unexpected critiques of the Clinton Administration, from which nearly half of the panelists came. Of the seven Clinton alumni to hit the podium, more than half made the case for American relativism and brought up Abu Ghraib, frequently in the same sentence: • President Clinton’s chief of staff, John Podesta, now a visiting law professor at Georgetown, evoked the “image of Iraqi civilians...

This is a scattered editorial. Rich begins by puffing an Abu Ghraib film supposed to excite the masses. It doesn't sound interesting and, to Rich's credit, he gives up on this score. He then confesses his confusion and unhappiness and blames the American people for disinterest in his and the NYT's preoccupation with Iraq an alleged atrocities. "...This is not merely a showbiz phenomenon but a leading indicator of where our entire culture is right now. It’s not just torture we want to avoid. Most Americans don’t want to hear, see or feel anything about Iraq, whether they support the...

The release of another previously classified Justice Department memo on the interrogation of terrorists (here and here) has reignited the specious “torture narrative,” propounded gleefully by Bush-administration critics. The narrative holds that the prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib was the direct and even intended consequence of a set of executive-branch legal opinions on the status of terrorist detainees and the president’s wartime authority. The New York Times announced in an April 4 editorial that the latest declassified memo leaves no doubt that the “abuse of prisoners” was “calculated policy” rather than “rogue acts.” “When the abuses at Abu Ghraib became...

Was just over on IMDB and saw the trailer for an upcoming flick titled "Standard Operating Procedure." It's about Abu Ghraib. Another anti-American, anti-military film coming our way. Hey, no worry though - they support the troops./sarc. On a related note, I'm sure everyone has heard the latest inane utterings of the insane Ted Turner. Not the idiotic bs about us being canibals ten years from now but his slanderous comments on our troops, our mission, our military. But hey, we can never question their patriotism, right! It makes me boil with anger.

Bush's War Monday, March 24 and Tuesday, March 25, 2008 9 P.M. (check local listings) From the horror of 9/11 to the invasion of Iraq; the truth about WMD to the rise of an insurgency; the scandal of Abu Ghraib to the strategy of the surge-for six years, FRONTLINE has revealed the defining stories of the war on terror in meticulous detail, and the political dramas that played out at the highest levels of power and influence. Now, on the fifth anniversary of the Iraq invasion, the full saga unfolds in the two-part FRONTLINE special Bush's War, airing Monday, March...

As a loyal officer under Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi major never imagined that one day he would become an insurgent, but when Iraq fell five years ago he was left bitter, jobless and desperate to drive the invading forces out. “I saw my country collapse right in front of my eyes,” said Abu Abdullah, who has since orchestrated countless attacks against the US military, spent time in the notorious Abu Ghraib detention centre and briefly joined forces with al-Qaeda. Recalling the invasion, he told The Times: “I felt as though my freedom was being snatched from me. It was one...

Three senior US generals will appear before senators today to explain what they knew about the abuse of Iraqi prisoners by soldiers under their command. The Senate Armed Services Committee will hear evidence from General John Abizaid, the head of US Central Command, Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, commander of ground troops in Iraq and Major General Geoffrey Miller, the deputy commander of prison operations. Their appearance coincides with the first military trials in Baghdad of soldiers accused of abusing Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison. The officer who was in charge of guards at Abu Ghraib has said that the...

The only Army officer charged with a crime as a result of the abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq has been cleared of all criminal responsibility in the case after a general this week dismissed the one conviction against him and wiped away the sentence. Lt. Col. Steven L. Jordan was convicted last year on one charge of disobeying an order when a jury found that he spoke to others about the Abu Ghraib investigation after he was ordered not to do so. Though Jordan was exonerated at trial of any connection to the abuse of Iraqi detainees...