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General Taguba Knew Torture Scandal Went to the Top Friday 20 June 2008
by: Joseph L. Galloway, McClatchy Newspapers
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Taguba and his investigators sifted and probed and assessed the blame as high as they were permitted to go. Taguba believed - no, he KNEW - that the responsibility for this outrage went much higher. He knew it reached to the office of then Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and likely beyond to the lawyers who served President George W. Bush and perhaps even to the president himself.
But the brass, military and civilian, wanted Taguba and those who ran 16 other Army investigations of the Abu Ghraib scandal only to get to the bottom of the situation, not to the top.
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In the preface to a damning report on the treatment of Guantanamo detainees by a group called Physicians for Human Rights - which had examined and interviewed 11 former Guantanamo detainees freed without charges - Taguba declared that there was no longer any doubt whatsoever that President George W. Bush and others in the White House had committed war crimes.
"The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account," Taguba wrote. "The commander in chief and those under him authorized a systematic regime of torture."
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