Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: General says Abu Ghraib scandal will resonate ‘for years to come’

General says Abu Ghraib scandal will resonate ‘for years to come’
Even in retirement, Antonio Taguba, whose report on inmate abuse shed new
light on the U.S. ‘war on terror,’ remains the good soldier and reluctant
critic  
By Barry Bergman, Public Affairs | 13 February 2008
Major Gen. Antonio Taguba’s shattering report on the Abu Ghraib scandal
was released in March 2004, effectively ending America’s claim to the
moral high ground in its “war on terror” and making him, by all accounts,
persona non grata at Donald Rumsfeld’s Pentagon. Notwithstanding his
singular perspective from the eye of what became an international
hurricane, Taguba waited until June 2007 — nearly six months from the day
he retired, under pressure, after 34 years of active duty in the U.S. Army
— before giving his first interview, to New Yorker investigative reporter
Seymour Hersh.  
Retired Gen. Antonio Taguba, who says he’s declined moneymaking offers to
write books or appear in documentaries, came to Berkeley last week to talk
about human rights and the “war on terror.” (Christine Jegan photo)
 
Taguba, who made a rare public appearance on campus last week, never asked
for that grisly, career-ending assignment. And he remains a reluctant
critic of the nation he believed he was serving honorably by investigating
allegations that U.S. military police had subjected inmates at the Baghdad
prison to brutal and inhumane treatment. Taguba’s official report
concluded that MPs had inflicted “sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal
abuse” on prisoners in their custody; graphic photos, some of which were
first aired by CBS News, showed GIs forcing Islamic detainees into
sexually humiliating poses and threatening them with dogs. 
Although his orders were to investigate no higher in the chain of command
than the MP level, Taguba testified to Congress that the abuses stemmed
from a “failure in leadership . . . from the brigade commander on down.”
“The president,” he told Hersh, “had to be aware of this.”
At a time when the Iraq war still had the support of much of the U.S.
electorate, the explosive revelations of abuse at Abu Ghraib — treatment
Taguba found was meant to soften up prisoners for interrogation by U.S.
intelligence officers — shook the military, the country, and the world.
Yet if Taguba’s name and face remain unfamiliar to most Americans, that’s
largely by design. He consented to speak at Berkeley — as he said from the
stage of International House’s Chevron Auditorium — only due to the
persistence of Rachel Shigekane, senior program manager for the campus
Human Rights Center. He declined to give interviews in advance of his
talk, agreeing to a brief meeting with the Berkeleyan only after he’d left
the podium. 
“I choose my audiences very carefully,” he explained in a small room
behind the theater, where he spoke for 30 minutes and answered audience
questions for another 30. “I don’t do it just to appear. If it’s for
educational purposes, yes. If it’s to inform the public, yes. Is it to
gain public notoriety with a lot of interviews like what you’re doing
today? No. Because there’s one thing that’s very precious to me, and
that’s my privacy.”
As polite and low-key one-on-one as he seems from the podium, Taguba said
he’s refused book and documentary-film offers. “I’ve turned down a lot of
money,” he said, rather than join the parade of government officials who
have left office under a cloud of mistrust, only to write books “and tell
the world that it wasn’t their fault, and make millions of dollars off the
backs of our soldiers.…I don’t want to be looked upon as an opportunist.”
Taguba comes by his reticence honestly. His 89-year-old father, born, like
him, in the Philippines, was captured by the Japanese in World War II and
endured the Bataan Death March — later designated a war crime — before
making his escape. “My father re-­ members the horrors of Bataan,” Taguba
told an audience of several hundred, “but does not speak much of them
today.” 
Dressed in a dark suit set off with a red tie and an American-flag pin on
his lapel, the slight, graying two-star general referred to notes
throughout his talk, speaking haltingly and wearing a smile that seemed
part pained, part bemused — even when he was asked about images of abuses
at Abu Ghraib reportedly too disturbing to have been included in his full,
still-classified report. He confirmed their existence, and said he
believed they should remain under wraps due to their “horrific” nature. 
Dehumanizing of inmates at Abu Ghraib 
 
“The bottom line,” said Taguba, is that torture is “immoral,” “amoral,”
and “unlawful.” The Abu Ghraib scandal has “affected the moral and ethical
conscience of our nation,” and will continue to resonate throughout the
world “for many years to come.” 
In the wake of the revelations, he said, “The negative image of the U.S.
became a cliché,” and American troops in Iraq were “labeled as occupiers,
not liberators.” 
Nevertheless, “The White House continues to justify the use of torture, as
recently as yesterday,” he said, referring to the refusal by Attorney
General Michael Mukasey and other Bush administration officials to clearly
rule out the interrogation technique known as waterboarding, which
critics, including many in Congress, insist is a form of torture. 
Taguba cited one former administration official, Berkeley law professor
John Yoo, for special mention. Yoo, who served in the Justice Department’s
Office of Legal Counsel from 2001 to 2003, is widely credited with — or
blamed for — a series of controversial memos he wrote arguing for vastly
expanded presidential powers in time of war, including those that govern
the treatment of captive suspects.
Those so-called “torture memos,” Taguba charged, “paved the way for the
ambiguity of rules of war” and “placed our country at greater risk in
fighting terrorism.” It is “truly disingenuous and irresponsible,” he
added, for the White House to promulgate policies that contradict both
national and international law — including the Geneva Conventions — and
then blame abuses on “aberrant behavior” by those on the lower rungs of
the chain of command.
A few soldiers received prison sentences for their roles in the Abu Ghraib
scandal, but no officers or civilian leaders have been held criminally
responsible. A handful, including the officer in charge of the prison,
Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, have been demoted and reassigned.
Taguba, of course, was himself a casualty of Abu Ghraib, punished not for
“aberrant behavior” but for following orders to investigate the scandal —
an assignment for which he “didn’t exactly raise my hand” to volunteer,
but which he took more seriously, perhaps, than Washington expected. “At
the end of each day, it’s all about integrity,” he said. If he harbors any
rancor, it was not evident during his Berkeley appearance.
Even in retirement, it seems, he’s still the good soldier. “You take off
the uniform, but you don’t shed the skin,” he told the Berkeleyan. 
Abu Ghraib, he added, “is a wonderful case study. You have to go back to
why it happened, what precipitated it all. It’s because people made the
policy that said, ‘Get me what I need right now, yesterday, and I don’t
care how you get it.’ 
“Soldiers are trained people,” he said. “But when their leaders fail to
supervise them… [civilian] authorities, who are not subject to the Uniform
Code of Military Justice or any other laws, may take it upon themselves to
exploit the situation.” 
Taguba’s appearance was the first of three events in a spring colloquium,
“The ‘War on Terror’ and Human Rights,” sponsored by the Human Rights
Center, the International Human Rights Law Clinic, and the Berkeley
Project on Law and Terrorism. For details, visit the center’s website,
www.hrcberkeley.org/events.html
.
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General says Abu Ghraib scandal will resonate ‘for years to come’
Invece il taglio della testa a prigionieri vivi e coscienti se lo sono
dimenticati tutti e nessuno ne parlerà mai più in futuro.

 dimenticati tutti e nessuno ne parlerà mai più in futuro.
nessuno ha mai detto che i terroristi sono civili, mentre più di uno
pretenderebbe di dire che l'esercito USA lo è. Ma evidentemente un
generale americano ci tiene al buon nome dei suoi uomini, a differenza
tua

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
Ora cosa c'entra la rivoluzione francese? Certo che quando non sapete
cosa dire, v'appigliate a tutto!



Fai pur finta di non capire. I tuoi beneamati terroristi islamici
hanno tagliato la testa a diversi prigionieri vivi e coscienti.
Questa è una forma di tortura terribile, ma voialtri cavernicoli della
sinistra estrema non avete nulla da obiettare. Tanto voi non siete dei
veri pacifisti, ma solo della gente faziosa schierata da una parte e
che ipocritamente finge di essere per la pace.

 Questa è una forma di tortura terribile,
non è una forma di tortura, perchè di solito si crepa...

Fai pur finta di non capire. I tuoi beneamati terroristi islamici
Grandissimo testa di cazzo e figlio di puttana! Non permetterti
minimamente ad accomunarmi ai musulmani! Spero taglino anche la tua
dio testa, cosě resti senza minchia, idiota!