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http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=18645Postcards from the Edge By Tom Engelhardt, tomdispatch.com May 9, 2004 "The next day , Gen. John Abizaid, commander of all U.S. forces in the region, was on the phone to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld. 'General Abizaid informed the leadership within hours of the incident,' said a senior Pentagon official. Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, the military's spokesman in Iraq, also called the Pentagon, though with more alarming words. 'He said, "We've got a really bad situation," recalled one official, who like others requested anonymity. 'The evidence is damaging and horrific,' 'We've got a really bad situation...'
"Abizaid talked daily with Rumsfeld about Iraq, and the prison investigation likely came up often, officials said. Top Pentagon leaders, such as Rumsfeld and Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, as well as President Bush were kept aware of the situation, said Gen. Peter Pace, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, on the CBS Early Show yesterday." (Tom Bowman, the Baltimore Sun)
The Torture System
It's worth starting with the basics, because they are what you're likely to see the least of in the uproar at hand.
The system of injustice that, since 9/11, we've sent offshore and organized globally – from Guantanamo, Cuba to Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan – is by its nature also a system of torture. It was designed from the beginning to be a Bermuda Triangle of injustice, existing in an extrajudicial darkness beyond "our" sight or oversight. There, on military bases and in special military-controlled prisons, the "war on terrorism" could be carried to its informational climax in whatever ways and by whatever methods American intelligence officials felt might "break" whatever prisoners we had.
Whether in Guantanamo or at Abu Ghraib in Iraq, this developing mini-gulag was never meant to be a system of imprisonment for crimes – hence the lack of charges, no less trials of any sort, anywhere in the imperium. It was to be an eternal holding operation for the purpose of information extraction (and possibly revenge). The men (and woman) running the Bush administration's foreign policy in this period didn't have to specify the actual use of torture, though some of them seem to have done so. We know from the Sunday Washington Post that, in April 2003, after "debates" on the subject, Pentagon officials at "the highest levels" approved twenty "psychologically stressful" methods of interrogation, most or all of which any sane person would classify as torture, including the questioning of naked prisoners, and that these methods were later approved at least for "high-value detainees" in Iraq. In the meantime, there was a good deal of post-9/11 torture chatter in the media about how much of it we could, should, and would use in a war to the death against a fanatic enemy.
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