Someone's lying -- big-time -- and neither Congress nor the media have begun to scratch the surface. Clearly we now know enough to stipulate that the several low-ranking alleged sadists charged in the Iraq torture scandal did not control the wing of the prison in which they openly and proudly did the devil's work.
That power was in the hands of high-ranking U.S. military intelligence officers who established abusive conditions that were condemned by the Red Cross in a complaint to U.S. authorities well before the horrid incidents that recently shocked the nation.
The Red Cross complaint -- and a follow-up report that was made available to the administration in February and obtained by the Wall Street Journal this week -- raises the sobering possibility that these low-level members of the military police in Iraq may be right in claiming that they were just following orders of their superiors.
According to the report, the organization's delegates visited Abu Ghraib in October 2003 and witnessed "the practice of keeping persons deprived of their liberty completely naked in totally empty concrete cells and in total darkness" for days.
"Upon witnessing such cases, the [Red Cross] interrupted its visits and requested an explanation from the authorities. The military intelligence officer in charge of interrogation explained that this practice was 'part of the process.' " The report said that what Red Cross representatives saw "went beyond exceptional cases" and was "in some cases tantamount to torture."
The Red Cross complained directly to the authorities at that time, two months before the now-infamous photographs were taken.
The White House and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld have for months stubbornly ignored and kept from the public the conclusions of both the Red Cross report and the even more damning internal report done by Army Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba for the Pentagon in March.
The Taguba report clearly stated that the MPs had been instructed to "set physical and mental conditions for favorable interrogation of witnesses" and were using sexual humiliation, attack dogs and beatings to break prisoners.
It would appear that the Pentagon still doesn't want to admit the seriousness of the problem, having now assigned Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller to run Abu Ghraib despite the fact that it was Miller who last summer officially reported on conditions in Abu Ghraib and seems to have enabled, if not authorized, the torture that ensued in the autumn.
