Iraqi prison scandal

Just a quick run-through of some stuff you probably know already, along with one or two items you may not have heard yet:

Bush finally apologized. As a gentleman from Charleston once put it, W seems like the thief who is not at all sorry he stole but is very sorry he got caught. The Bush administration was aware of the Taguba report, but was more concerned with preventing exposure than with punishing the wrongdoers.

Josh Marshall made a brilliant catch: Since military intelligence seems to be the instigator of much of the abuse, we should take a look at the head of military intelligence -- and the Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence is that infamous religious zealot Lt. Gen. William G. "Jerry" Boykin. Here we have more proof that born-again militarists tend toward repressed homosexuality. Boykin, you will recall, once told a crowd "My God is bigger than your god" -- a statement which echoes the thinking pattern of a 12-year-old boy bragging about the size of something other than his deity.

Prisoner abuse has led to at least 27 deaths. Private contractors -- unaccountable under military law, American law, or Iraqi law (such as it is) -- are responsible for much of this.

Delta Force and the Navy Seals may well have been involved in the abuse. Robert Baer, the former CIA man turned author, has averred that the MPs themselves would not have known enough about Iraqi culture to understand the best way to humiliate their charges.

Rush, in a particularly insane tirade, called the prisoner abuse "brilliant," and compared it to good-old American homoerotic pornography! He can't understand why porn-loving liberals would complain. (I dunno, Rush -- maybe because everyone who appears in adult films asks for the work and gets paid?)

Limbaugh and Chris Matthews both seem under the impression that everyone abused at Abu Ghraib must have been guilty of participation in the insurgency. The Los Angeles Times yesterday carried a story of one pro-American Iraqi who was imprisoned on a charge equivalent to driving without registration; he was beaten, stripped naked and forced to simulate masturbation in front of a woman. He was later acquitted of the car-theft rap. I'm sure Rush would say: "See? The system works!"

"Many of the prisoners abused at the Abu Ghraib prison were innocent Iraqis picked up at random by US troops," according to the Guardian. Torin Nelson, a military intelligence officer who served both at Gitmo and Abu Ghraib, has told The Guardian that "30-40 percent" of the prisoners in Guantanamo have no connection to terrorism.

In Iraq, says Nelson, a unit in search of a target would settle for an Iraqi picked at random; back at the prison, that person would come in for particularly harsh abuse -- after all, he had done nothing to which he could confess. (Nelson is a witness, not a suspect, in the investigation -- but now that he has turned talker, I expect the infamously vengeful Bush administration to target him.)

A Reuters story, which indicates that the scandal is actually much larger than we now believe, includes this detail which gets more interesting the more I mull it over: "When military investigators were looking into abuses several months ago, they gave U.S. guards a week's notice before inspecting their possessions, several soldiers said." In other words, get rid of the contraband before the inspectors come.

Contraband would include the incriminating photos. Which brings us to the question: How did this material, how did this entire scandal, get out into the public eye?

Few commentators have addressed the issue. One blogger who is talking about it, Xymphora, does so in a fashion even I consider paranoid. That fact doesn't stop me from putting on my own pair of paranoiac sunglasses; when I do, I tend to see most Iraq-related events in terms of the "war" between CIA and the neocons in the administration. Granted, neither party to that fight comes out of this current business looking good. Even so, if you see Fox News commentators or the Moonie Times attempt to blame the Abu Ghraib scandal entirely on CIA interrogators, you'll know which side of the White House/Langley "war" engineered the release of the photos in the first place.