still more torture in iraq - Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community

roachboy · 03-19-2006, 07:53 AM

caveat lector: this is long.

Quote:

Before and After Abu Ghraib, a U.S. Unit Abused Detainees
By ERIC SCHMITT and CAROLYN MARSHALL

As the Iraqi insurgency intensified in early 2004, an elite Special Operations forces unit converted one of Saddam Hussein's former military bases near Baghdad into a top-secret detention center. There, American soldiers made one of the former Iraqi government's torture chambers into their own interrogation cell. They named it the Black Room.

In the windowless, jet-black garage-size room, some soldiers beat prisoners with rifle butts, yelled and spit in their faces and, in a nearby area, used detainees for target practice in a game of jailer paintball. Their intention was to extract information to help hunt down Iraq's most-wanted terrorist, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, according to Defense Department personnel who served with the unit or were briefed on its operations.

The Black Room was part of a temporary detention site at Camp Nama, the secret headquarters of a shadowy military unit known as Task Force 6-26. Located at Baghdad International Airport, the camp was the first stop for many insurgents on their way to the Abu Ghraib prison a few miles away.

Placards posted by soldiers at the detention area advised, "NO BLOOD, NO FOUL." The slogan, as one Defense Department official explained, reflected an adage adopted by Task Force 6-26: "If you don't make them bleed, they can't prosecute for it." According to Pentagon specialists who worked with the unit, prisoners at Camp Nama often disappeared into a detention black hole, barred from access to lawyers or relatives, and confined for weeks without charges. "The reality is, there were no rules there," another Pentagon official said.

The story of detainee abuse in Iraq is a familiar one. But the following account of Task Force 6-26, based on documents and interviews with more than a dozen people, offers the first detailed description of how the military's most highly trained counterterrorism unit committed serious abuses.

It adds to the picture of harsh interrogation practices at American military prisons in Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, as well as at secret Central Intelligence Agency detention centers around the world.

The new account reveals the extent to which the unit members mistreated prisoners months before and after the photographs of abuse from Abu Ghraib were made public in April 2004, and it helps belie the original Pentagon assertions that abuse was confined to a small number of rogue reservists at Abu Ghraib.

The abuses at Camp Nama continued despite warnings beginning in August 2003 from an Army investigator and American intelligence and law enforcement officials in Iraq. The C.I.A. was concerned enough to bar its personnel from Camp Nama that August.

It is difficult to compare the conditions at the camp with those at Abu Ghraib because so little is known about the secret compound, which was off limits even to the Red Cross. The abuses appeared to have been unsanctioned, but some of them seemed to have been well known throughout the camp.

For an elite unit with roughly 1,000 people at any given time, Task Force 6-26 seems to have had a large number of troops punished for detainee abuse. Since 2003, 34 task force members have been disciplined in some form for mistreating prisoners, and at least 11 members have been removed from the unit, according to new figures the Special Operations Command provided in response to questions from The New York Times. Five Army Rangers in the unit were convicted three months ago for kicking and punching three detainees in September 2005.

Some of the serious accusations against Task Force 6-26 have been reported over the past 16 months by news organizations including NBC, The Washington Post and The Times. Many details emerged in hundreds of pages of documents released under a Freedom of Information Act request by the American Civil Liberties Union. But taken together for the first time, the declassified documents and interviews with more than a dozen military and civilian Defense Department and other federal personnel provide the most detailed portrait yet of the secret camp and the inner workings of the clandestine unit.

The documents and interviews also reflect a culture clash between the free-wheeling military commandos and the more cautious Pentagon civilians working with them that escalated to a tense confrontation. At one point, one of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's top aides, Stephen A. Cambone, ordered a subordinate to "get to the bottom" of any misconduct.

Most of the people interviewed for this article were midlevel civilian and military Defense Department personnel who worked with Task Force 6-26 and said they witnessed abuses, or who were briefed on its operations over the past three years.

Many were initially reluctant to discuss Task Force 6-26 because its missions are classified. But when pressed repeatedly by reporters who contacted them, they agreed to speak about their experiences and observations out of what they said was anger and disgust over the unit's treatment of detainees and the failure of task force commanders to punish misconduct more aggressively. The critics said the harsh interrogations yielded little information to help capture insurgents or save American lives.

Virtually all of those who agreed to speak are career government employees, many with previous military service, and they were granted anonymity to encourage them to speak candidly without fear of retribution from the Pentagon. Many of their complaints are supported by declassified military documents and e-mail messages from F.B.I. agents who worked regularly with the task force in Iraq.

A Demand for Intelligence

Military officials say there may have been extenuating circumstances for some of the harsh treatment at Camp Nama and its field stations in other parts of Iraq. By the spring of 2004, the demand on interrogators for intelligence was growing to help combat the increasingly numerous and deadly insurgent attacks.

Some detainees may have been injured resisting capture. A spokesman for the Special Operations Command, Kenneth S. McGraw, said there was sufficient evidence to prove misconduct in only 5 of 29 abuse allegations against task force members since 2003. As a result of those five incidents, 34 people were disciplined.

"We take all those allegations seriously," Gen. Bryan D. Brown, the commander of the Special Operations Command, said in a brief hallway exchange on Capitol Hill on March 8. "Any kind of abuse is not consistent with the values of the Special Operations Command."

The secrecy surrounding the highly classified unit has helped to shield its conduct from public scrutiny. The Pentagon will not disclose the unit's precise size, the names of its commanders, its operating bases or specific missions. Even the task force's name changes regularly to confuse adversaries, and the courts-martial and other disciplinary proceedings have not identified the soldiers in public announcements as task force members.

General Brown's command declined requests for interviews with several former task force members and with Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who leads the Joint Special Operations Command, the headquarters at Fort Bragg, N.C., that supplies the unit's most elite troops.

One Special Operations officer and a senior enlisted soldier identified by Defense Department personnel as former task force members at Camp Nama declined to comment when contacted by telephone. Attempts to contact three other Special Operations soldiers who were in the unit ? by phone, through relatives and former neighbors ? were also unsuccessful.

Cases of detainee abuse attributed to Task Force 6-26 demonstrate both confusion over and, in some cases, disregard for approved interrogation practices and standards for detainee treatment, according to Defense Department specialists who have worked with the unit.

In early 2004, an 18-year-old man suspected of selling cars to members of the Zarqawi terrorist network was seized with his entire family at their home in Baghdad. Task force soldiers beat him repeatedly with a rifle butt and punched him in the head and kidneys, said a Defense Department specialist briefed on the incident.

Some complaints were ignored or played down in a unit where a conspiracy of silence contributed to the overall secretiveness. "It's under control," one unit commander told a Defense Department official who complained about mistreatment at Camp Nama in the spring of 2004.

For hundreds of suspected insurgents, Camp Nama was a way station on a journey that started with their capture on the battlefield or in their homes, and ended often in a cell at Abu Ghraib. Hidden in plain sight just off a dusty road fronting Baghdad International Airport, Camp Nama was an unmarked, virtually unknown compound at the edge of the taxiways.

The heart of the camp was the Battlefield Interrogation Facility, alternately known as the Temporary Detention Facility and the Temporary Holding Facility. The interrogation and detention areas occupied a corner of the larger compound, separated by a fence topped with razor wire.

Unmarked helicopters flew detainees into the camp almost daily, former task force members said. Dressed in blue jumpsuits with taped goggles covering their eyes, the shackled prisoners were led into a screening room where they were registered and examined by medics.

Just beyond the screening rooms, where Saddam Hussein was given a medical exam after his capture, detainees were kept in as many as 85 cells spread over two buildings. Some detainees were kept in what was known as Motel 6, a group of crudely built plywood shacks that reeked of urine and excrement. The shacks were cramped, forcing many prisoners to squat or crouch. Other detainees were housed inside a separate building in 6-by-8-foot cubicles in a cellblock called Hotel California.

The interrogation rooms were stark. High-value detainees were questioned in the Black Room, nearly bare but for several 18-inch hooks that jutted from the ceiling, a grisly reminder of the terrors inflicted by Mr. Hussein's inquisitors. Jailers often blared rap music or rock 'n' roll at deafening decibels over a loudspeaker to unnerve their subjects.

Another smaller room offered basic comforts like carpets and cushioned seating to put more cooperative prisoners at ease, said several Defense Department specialists who worked at Camp Nama. Detainees wore heavy, olive-drab hoods outside their cells. By June 2004, the revelations of abuse at Abu Ghraib galvanized the military to promise better treatment for prisoners. In one small concession at Camp Nama, soldiers exchanged the hoods for cloth blindfolds with drop veils that allowed detainees to breathe more freely but prevented them from peeking out.

Some former task force members said the Nama in the camp's name stood for a coarse phrase that soldiers used to describe the compound. One Defense Department specialist recalled seeing pink blotches on detainees' clothing as well as red welts on their bodies, marks he learned later were inflicted by soldiers who used detainees as targets and called themselves the High Five Paintball Club.

Mr. McGraw, the military spokesman, said he had not heard of the Black Room or the paintball club and had not seen any mention of them in the documents he had reviewed.

In a nearby operations center, task force analysts pored over intelligence collected from spies, detainees and remotely piloted Predator surveillance aircraft, to piece together clues to aid soldiers on their raids. Twice daily at noon and midnight military interrogators and their supervisors met with officials from the C.I.A., F.B.I. and allied military units to review operations and new intelligence.

Task Force 6-26 was a creation of the Pentagon's post-Sept. 11 campaign against terrorism, and it quickly became the model for how the military would gain intelligence and battle insurgents in the future. Originally known as Task Force 121, it was formed in the summer of 2003, when the military merged two existing Special Operations units, one hunting Osama bin Laden in and around Afghanistan, and the other tracking Mr. Hussein in Iraq. (Its current name is Task Force 145.)

The task force was a melting pot of military and civilian units. It drew on elite troops from the Joint Special Operations Command, whose elements include the Army unit Delta Force, Navy's Seal Team 6 and the 75th Ranger Regiment. Military reservists and Defense Intelligence Agency personnel with special skills, like interrogators, were temporarily assigned to the unit. C.I.A. officers, F.B.I. agents and special operations forces from other countries also worked closely with the task force.

Many of the American Special Operations soldiers wore civilian clothes and were allowed to grow beards and long hair, setting them apart from their uniformed colleagues. Unlike conventional soldiers and marines whose Iraq tours lasted 7 to 12 months, unit members and their commanders typically rotated every 90 days.

Task Force 6-26 had a singular focus: capture or kill Mr. Zarqawi, the Jordanian militant operating in Iraq. "Anytime there was even the smell of Zarqawi nearby, they would go out and use any means possible to get information from a detainee," one official said.

Defense Department personnel briefed on the unit's operations said the harsh treatment extended beyond Camp Nama to small field outposts in Baghdad, Falluja, Balad, Ramadi and Kirkuk. These stations were often nestled within the alleys of a city in nondescript buildings with suburban-size yards where helicopters could land to drop off or pick up detainees.

At the outposts, some detainees were stripped naked and had cold water thrown on them to cause the sensation of drowning, said Defense Department personnel who served with the unit.

In January 2004, the task force captured the son of one of Mr. Hussein's bodyguards in Tikrit. The man told Army investigators that he was forced to strip and that he was punched in the spine until he fainted, put in front of an air-conditioner while cold water was poured on him and kicked in the stomach until he vomited. Army investigators were forced to close their inquiry in June 2005 after they said task force members used battlefield pseudonyms that made it impossible to identify and locate the soldiers involved. The unit also asserted that 70 percent of its computer files had been lost.

Despite the task force's access to a wide range of intelligence, its raids were often dry holes, yielding little if any intelligence and alienating ordinary Iraqis, Defense Department personnel said. Prisoners deemed no threat to American troops were often driven deep into the Iraqi desert at night and released, sometimes given $100 or more in American money for their trouble.

Back at Camp Nama, the task force leaders established a ritual for departing personnel who did a good job, Pentagon officials said. The commanders presented them with two unusual mementos: a detainee hood and a souvenir piece of tile from the medical screening room that once held Mr. Hussein.

Early Signs of Trouble

Accusations of abuse by Task Force 6-26 came as no surprise to many other officials in Iraq. By early 2004, both the C.I.A. and the F.B.I. had expressed alarm about the military's harsh interrogation techniques.

The C.I.A.'s Baghdad station sent a cable to headquarters on Aug. 3, 2003, raising concern that Special Operations troops who served with agency officers had used techniques that had become too aggressive. Five days later, the C.I.A. issued a classified directive that prohibited its officers from participating in harsh interrogations. Separately, the C.I.A. barred its officers from working at Camp Nama but allowed them to keep providing target information and other intelligence to the task force.

The warnings still echoed nearly a year later. On June 25, 2004, nearly two months after the disclosure of the abuses at Abu Ghraib, an F.B.I. agent in Iraq sent an e-mail message to his superiors in Washington, warning that a detainee captured by Task Force 6-26 had suspicious burn marks on his body. The detainee said he had been tortured. A month earlier, another F.B.I. agent asked top bureau officials for guidance on how to deal with military interrogators across Iraq who used techniques like loud music and yelling that exceeded "the bounds of standard F.B.I. practice."

American generals were also alerted to the problem. In December 2003, Col. Stuart A. Herrington, a retired Army intelligence officer, warned in a confidential memo that medical personnel reported that prisoners seized by the unit, then known as Task Force 121, had injuries consistent with beatings. "It seems clear that TF 121 needs to be reined in with respect to its treatment of detainees," Colonel Herrington concluded.

By May 2004, just as the scandal at Abu Ghraib was breaking, tensions increased at Camp Nama between the Special Operations troops and civilian interrogators and case officers from the D.I.A.'s Defense Human Intelligence Service, who were there to support the unit in its fight against the Zarqawi network. The discord, according to documents, centered on the harsh treatment of detainees as well as restrictions the Special Operations troops placed on their civilian colleagues, like monitoring their e-mail messages and phone calls.

Maj. Gen. George E. Ennis, who until recently commanded the D.I.A.'s human intelligence division, declined to be interviewed for this article. But in written responses to questions, General Ennis said he never heard about the numerous complaints made by D.I.A. personnel until he and his boss, Vice Adm. Lowell E. Jacoby, then the agency's director, were briefed on June 24, 2004.

The next day, Admiral Jacoby wrote a two-page memo to Mr. Cambone, under secretary of defense for intelligence. In it, he described a series of complaints, including a May 2004 incident in which a D.I.A. interrogator said he witnessed task force soldiers punch a detainee hard enough to require medical help. The D.I.A. officer took photos of the injuries, but a supervisor confiscated them, the memo said.

The tensions laid bare a clash of military cultures. Combat-hardened commandos seeking a steady flow of intelligence to pinpoint insurgents grew exasperated with civilian interrogators sent from Washington, many of whom were novices at interrogating hostile prisoners fresh off the battlefield.

"These guys wanted results, and our debriefers were used to a civil environment," said one Defense Department official who was briefed on the task force operations.

Within days after Admiral Jacoby sent his memo, the D.I.A. took the extraordinary step of temporarily withdrawing its personnel from Camp Nama.

Admiral Jacoby's memo also provoked an angry reaction from Mr. Cambone. "Get to the bottom of this immediately. This is not acceptable," Mr. Cambone said in a handwritten note on June 26, 2004, to his top deputy, Lt. Gen. William G. Boykin. "In particular, I want to know if this is part of a pattern of behavior by TF 6-26."

General Boykin said through a spokesman on March 17 that at the time he told Mr. Cambone he had found no pattern of misconduct with the task force.

A Shroud of Secrecy

Military and legal experts say the full breadth of abuses committed by Task Force 6-26 may never be known because of the secrecy surrounding the unit, and the likelihood that some allegations went unreported.

In the summer of 2004, Camp Nama closed and the unit moved to a new headquarters in Balad, 45 miles north of Baghdad. The unit's operations are now shrouded in even tighter secrecy.

Soon after their rank-and-file clashed in 2004, D.I.A. officials in Washington and military commanders at Fort Bragg agreed to improve how the task force integrated specialists into its ranks. The D.I.A. is now sending small teams of interrogators, debriefers and case officers, called "deployable Humint teams," to work with Special Operations forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Senior military commanders insist that the elite warriors, who will be relied on more than ever in the campaign against terrorism, are now treating detainees more humanely and can police themselves. The C.I.A. has resumed conducting debriefings with the task force, but does not permit harsh questioning, a C.I.A. official said.

General McChrystal, the leader of the Joint Special Operations Command, received his third star in a promotion ceremony at Fort Bragg on March 13.

On Dec. 8, 2004, the Pentagon's spokesman, Lawrence Di Rita, said that four Special Operations soldiers from the task force were punished for "excessive use of force" and administering electric shocks to detainees with stun guns. Two of the soldiers were removed from the unit. To that point, Mr. Di Rita said, 10 task force members had been disciplined. Since then, according to the new figures provided to The Times, the number of those disciplined for detainee abuse has more than tripled. Nine of the 34 troops disciplined received written or oral counseling. Others were reprimanded for slapping detainees and other offenses.

The five Army Rangers who were court-martialed in December received punishments including jail time of 30 days to six months and reduction in rank. Two of them will receive bad-conduct discharges upon completion of their sentences.

Human rights advocates and leading members of Congress say the Pentagon must still do more to hold senior-level commanders and civilian officials accountable for the misconduct.

The Justice Department inspector general is investigating complaints of detainee abuse by Task Force 6-26, a senior law enforcement official said. The only wide-ranging military inquiry into prisoner abuse by Special Operations forces was completed nearly a year ago by Brig. Gen. Richard P. Formica, and was sent to Congress.

But the United States Central Command has refused repeated requests from The Times over the past several months to provide an unclassified copy of General Formica's findings despite Mr. Rumsfeld's instructions that such a version of all 12 major reports into detainee abuse be made public

source: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/19/in...age&oref=login

this article raises many many questions.

first at the level of that strange phenomenon of apparent repetition in history. in the book "gangrene"--whch is one of the most scathing indictments of french actions in the context of the algerian war, one of the most boggling accusations is that the french were carrying out particularly brutal torture of "important" suspects in rooms in the ministry of the interior building in paris that the gestapo had used to torture resistance suspects during world war 2....so here we are again, another loop within a larger loop within a larger loop (reoccupation of a dense symbol of repression, with all the symbolic damage possible, in the context of wars that seem to repeat each other in many ways)....

for some reason, over the past few weeks i have watched a number of films concerning the situation the militant left found itself in during the 1970s, particularly in germany--"germany in autumn"---"the legend of rita"---a couple others...in each, a central preoccupation is the realization, which seems to have been widely shared, that while there were features of fascism that had been eliminated--the state structures, the symbolic networks, the uniforms---others continued to function. the nationalism, the contempt for law, the use of the "state of exception" to justify/structure contempt for law, the fear of "terrorism" as a trigger for it, the results--a kind of numbing brutality---numbing in its recurrence---numbing as a function of the psychological implications of knowing about this recurrent brutality---numbing in the sense of the scale of the ideological assumptions that enable it to happen again and again and again--numbing in the sense that it triggers a kind of dissonance that makes it difficult to continue functioning in a context shaped by these preconditions.

then there is the strange tendency for unconscious repetition--that this unit would take over the torture rooms in the palace of saddam hussein and would use it to do very similar things---it almost seems to follow from a strange need to confess.

worse still, this new information also works in a network of repetitions particular to the bush administration in the context of its curious war on ghosts: you see it in relate space, like guantanomo, like abu ghraib--you see it at the highest levels of administration practices--launching an invasion of another country of false pretenses--you see it repeated again and again in the context of administration violations of smaller-scale law in the name of "heimat security"--you see the same arguments floated: the "war on terror" is a state of emergency, a state of exception that requires Decision on the part of a Leader because "democracy"--its debates, its legal systems--are too slow, too cumbersome, too unmanly.

within this, there is a cavalier attitude toward the law that repeats at every level, it seems--no blood no foul. no blood no foul.

this sort of action on the part of an american administration should be understood as beyond the pale, as unacceptable, as grounds for action against it, legal and public. the administration is defended by its partisans on strict partisan grounds--because this guy is our guy, because our guy will be attacked by people who are simply disposed to do it becuase they are "liberal"--that is they simply do not like "us"--he and his actions are necessarily correct. but you would think a point would arrive at which such defenders as are still able to repeat that line would begin to wonder if the consequences of the actions of this administration outweigh the values of their ideological committments.

meanwhile in the context of a brutal war launched on false pretenses, grouped awkwardly into the context of the "war on terror" pitched domestically and internationally as part of an advocacy of "democracy" the american find themselves sliding into a civil war that their own actions have unleashed, unable to comprehend why the cmapaign for "hearts and minds" works no more in iraq than it did in vietnam--a war to oust saddam hussein that used his human rights abuses as a pretext for action during the course of which, in the name of "democracy" and "freedom" the americans find themselves becoming saddam hussein, repeating the same kind of actions, in the same places.

there is no possible defense of this kind of action.

meanwhile, in the kurdish village that hussein gassed in the 1980s, local residents have burned down the memorial and musem. "they do nothing for us" was among the arguments. these folk see themselves as having been used. and they are right.

for me, there is a such deep feeling of disgust---it makes itself felt but is hard to articulate.

host · 03-19-2006, 09:18 AM

You should have posted only the link to the nytimes article, not the entire text. After seven days, the article becomes inaccessible to the non-paying public.

Then....out of sight, out of mind!

Many of the original articles that I've posted on these threads are no longer available for public viewing, or are difficult to locate and reference to their originally published sources. A few can be retrieved at truthout. org, but if they are linked from "there", they are reflexively "tarred" with the dreaded "guerilla op-ed" label, discredited merely by association.

Even in this forum, undocumented chit-chat, passed off as legitimate and accurate argument, seems to be an adequate way to contribute to political discussion. The problem for me is that it isn't enough. It's almost always uninformed or underinformed opinion. The quality of the discussion and the accuracy, descends to a level below what I observe, for example, on the sexual advice and technique threads found elsewhere on TFP.

It doesn't only happen here, it's a problem that affects the entire opinion shaping process in the U.S. Talking points, political rhetoric, mixed with a foundation of prejudices, work their "magic" by turning out masses of folks who earnestly believe that they know WTF they are talking about.

The problem is that the opposite is true, and "they" vote for a guy who touts Jay-zuss as his "favorite philosopher", and then pursues policies of aggressive war, torture, and other crimes against humanity, and against the constitution that he took an oath to uphold.

The only way, IMO, to present the nytimes article above, accompanied by the comments that you made, roachboy....on a politcal forum, especially considering that the article will "disappear" in a week...is the way you did it.

roachboy · 03-19-2006, 09:22 AM

but the subscription is free for this...it is not in the pay section of the nyt....will the text be rexed after a week?

Ustwo · 03-19-2006, 09:40 AM

Was this NY Times story researched as well as this one?

Quote:

he New York Times has been caught peddling a phony front page story about Abu Ghraib, an interview with a man who said he was the infamous hooded prisoner: N.Y. Times’ Iraq Detainee Story Challenged.

NEW YORK - The New York Times is investigating questions raised about the identity of a man who said in a Page 1 profile that he is the Abu Ghraib prisoner whose hooded image became an icon of abuse by American captors.

The online magazine Salon.com challenged the man’s identity, based on an examination of 280 Abu Ghraib pictures it has been studying for weeks and on an interview with an official of the Army’s Criminal Investigation Command. The official says the man the Times profiled Saturday, Ali Shalal Qaissi, is not the detainee in the photograph.

In an e-mail to the Times, Chris Grey, chief spokesman for the Army investigations unit, wrote: “We have had several detainees claim they were the person depicted in the photograph in question. Our investigation indicates that the person you have is not the detainee who was depicted in the photograph released in connection with the Abu Ghraib investigation.”

“We take questions about our reporting very seriously, and we will carefully investigate Salon’s findings,” Susan Chira, the Times’ foreign editor, said in Tuesday’s editions. “We attempted to verify the claims of Mr. Qaissi thoroughly. We spoke with representatives of Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, who had interviewed Mr. Qaissi and believed him to be the man in the photographs.”

Interesting. When the Times wants to check a story about Abu Ghraib, they don’t call anyone in the US government. They call Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, two of the most politicized left-wing NGOs in the world.

This is followed by a times 'correction'

http://www.nytimes.com/ref/pageoneplus/corrections.html

Quote:

The Times did not adequately research Mr. Qaissi’s insistence that he was the man in the photograph. Mr. Qaissi’s account had already been broadcast and printed by other outlets, including PBS and Vanity Fair, without challenge. Lawyers for former prisoners at Abu Ghraib vouched for him. Human rights workers seemed to support his account. The Pentagon, asked for verification, declined to confirm or deny it.

Despite the previous reports, The Times should have been more persistent in seeking comment from the military. A more thorough examination of previous articles in The Times and other newspapers would have shown that in 2004 military investigators named another man as the one on the box, raising suspicions about Mr. Qaissi’s claim.

The Times also overstated the conviction with which representatives of Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International expressed their view of whether Mr. Qaissi was the man in the photograph. While they said he could well be that man, they did not say they believed he was.

Quote:

The Times Buries The Truth
In a brief, unsigned article buried deep within the newspaper today, the New York Times admitted that a major "scoop" in the newspaper on Saturday may have been nothing more than a load of ca-ca.

The front-page article, by the Times's house terrorism apologist Hassan Fattah, told the grisly tale of the poor feller who was photographed in a black hood at Abu Gharib. However, Salon last night found that the Times had the wrong guy -- and, as the Times did not point out, that his story had big holes.

Might have been nicer if the piece had run on the front page, particularly given some details that were published in Salon that the Times tastefully omitted. In addition to questioning whether the fellow interviewed by the Times was the one in the photo, Salon also found that other details in the ex-prisoner's story were apparently wrong. That is, the names of prisoners supposedly humiliated at the prison were not correct. Which might well mean that he just made up stuff.

Too bad the Times didn't mention that. I guess saving the paper from embarrassment is a lot more important than admitting that it ran a piece that is looking more and more like a lot of hooey from start to finish.

http://mediacrity.blogspot.com/2006/...ies-truth.html

The NY Times has become tabloid journalism, the Old Grey Lady is now offically senile.

roachboy · 03-19-2006, 09:59 AM

huh--so ustwo, i assume that for you a series of conclusions follow from the near non-sequitor you posted--the article is not about the photos from abu ghraib---but if i overlook the non-sequitor character of your post and work out where you could be going, it seems that your "argument" is because the nytimes misidentified who was behind the hood in that photo, then anything it publishes about torture in iraq is invalild?

it is not surprising that you do not actually state this conclusion--which is the only one inferrable.
i dont see much in it except an attempt to reduce dissonance.

personal aside:

i would imagine that you would see in this something problematic, were you to step outside the usual character ustwo plays and think about what is presented.
call me pollyanna, but i do not imagine that ustwo encompasses all of who you--the person who makes ustwo happen---are or how you view the world, any more than roachboy encompasses all i am or how i think about the world.

it would be interesting to get a glimpse of how that other guy, the 3-d guy, operates sometime.
judging from your posts in other spaces here, it seems that ustwo in politics is a narrow construct. i sometimes undertand how ustwo in politics works and why he is as he is, but not in this case.
i suspect it must be difficult holding the ustwo persona in politics together sometimes--but that is a simple speculation on my part.
no idea what kind of response i am looking for, or if one is required. i am just a bit baffled by the move above, and curious about what motivates it--and more generally how you see this ustwo persona, what you see it as doing, how it works and why.

host · 03-19-2006, 11:02 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ustwo

Was this NY Times story researched as well as this one?

This is followed by a times 'correction'

http://www.nytimes.com/ref/pageoneplus/corrections.html

http://mediacrity.blogspot.com/2006/...ies-truth.html

The NY Times has become tabloid journalism, the Old Grey Lady is now offically senile.

Ustwo, it's amusing to watch you "shill" for a totally discredited Bush administration, even as it's approval numbers sink to lows rivaled only by Nixon, on his way out of town in 1974.

You've presented an "OP" invented by the folks that you're on display here, carrying water for. Here's how it goes:
The U.S. military, the CIA, and the subcontractors on their payrolls, carried out an illegal campaign of torture and lesser illegal interrogation techniques and imprisonment, against the population of an Iraq that it invaded and occupied. They were stupid enough to carry out their shocking, administration approved crimes at the "evil dictator", Saddam's....own, most infamous Abu Ghraib prison, and to document their depravity on film, and to lose control over who had access to the filmed evidence.

The Bush administration and the U.S. military then made every effort to hide all of the film evidence, using the courts in a failed attempt to keep the filmed evidence of torture and abuse from the world, via dubious legal challenges, anchored in the hypocrisy that disclosure would further incite violent Arab and muslim reprisals.

At the same time, the military and the administration conducted a sham investigation intended not to obtain and reveal the truth and hold the responsible government and military officials responsible, but to minimize political fallout, deflect criticism, and conceal criminality. The administration and military officers protected themselves as they "served up" a few soldiers of enlisted rank to "take the fall" in sham court martial "show trials".

Now....along comes the NY Times, getting an offshoot story about the U.S. war crimes confused....covering an already confusing, previously covered story of a torture victim.

Ustwo subscribes to attempts to turn this into an indictment of all NY Times reporting that is unfavorable to the Bush administration:

Quote:

After alerting the Times Monday about the paper's error, Salon worked with a Times reporter in Dubai and an editor in New York as they reviewed their original story on Qaissi. Salon shared photographs and sources with the Times in an effort to shed light on Qaissi's experience at Abu Ghraib.

Unfortunately for Ustwo and the latest "smear OP" authors, the events Salon describes above are indicative of a reputable and functional news gathering and checking process, carried out by media rivals who place a higher priority on "getting it right", than on CYA or on smearing each other.
It seems like a description of a process that is intent on obtaining and delivering the "facts" to us.

Contrast Ustwo's "argument", combined with the spectacle of former Abu Ghraib commander, Gen. Janice Karpinski's <a href="http://abcnews.go.com/Nightline/IraqCoverage/story?id=751870&page=1">description of events</a> at that prison when the torture took place, after she was forced by the Pentagon to take blame, along with convicted enlisted soldiers, vs. that of former Gitmo warden and Abu Ghraib interrogation technique consultant, <a href="http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1174660,00.html">refusing to testify</a> under oath in a court martial of an enlisted soldier accused of abusing prisoners.
General Miller "took the fifth", and he still holds his rank, his career, and associated benefits.

In the strangely "upside down" world of Ustwo and the Bush administration, it is the NY Times, Gen. Janice Karpinski, and a few enlisted "scape goats", along with the Iraqi who was misidentified in the NY Times story, but who was apparently tortured or abused, who are held up for ridicule and disgrace....

....not the folks who designed and carried out a deliberate program of torture and abuse of Iraqi prisoners.....go figure????

Quote:

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/20..._photo_update/

March 18, 2006 | WASHINGTON -- The New York Times admitted Saturday to wrongly identifying the man in one of the most iconic photographs of abuse from the Abu Ghraib prison, after Salon presented evidence that the paper had made a mistake.

...On Tuesday, Salon published 279 photos and 19 videos of abuse at Abu Ghraib, along with nine essays explaining the back story of abuse. These documents were obtained last month by Salon's investigative reporter Mark Benjamin from a uniformed member of the military who spent time at Abu Ghraib and is familiar with the criminal investigation.

After alerting the Times Monday about the paper's error, Salon worked with a Times reporter in Dubai and an editor in New York as they reviewed their original story on Qaissi. Salon shared photographs and sources with the Times in an effort to shed light on Qaissi's experience at Abu Ghraib.

The Army records obtained by Salon strongly suggest that Qaissi was a detainee at Abu Ghraib on the night of Nov. 4, 2003, when another detainee, named Saad, was photographed on a cardboard box, with electrical wires on his hands. Military police at the prison knew Saad by his nickname "Gilligan."

At the time of the abuse, multiple digital cameras owned by military police photographed another man, nicknamed "The Claw," who had a deformed hand that matches the description of Qaissi. During the same two-hour period, those same cameras were used to photograph "Gilligan" on a box with electrical wires extending from his hands, according to the Army reports. (All the photos in question can be seen <a href="http://www.salon.com/news/abu_ghraib/2006/03/14/chapter_4/index.html">>here.</a>)

The Army's Criminal Investigation Command (CID) concluded that the five photographs of the man on the box with electrical wires all showed "the same incident" with a single hooded victim, a claim that was supported by the statements of several military police at the prison. Nonetheless, Qaissi and his attorney, Susan Burke of Burke Pyle LLC, still believe that Qaissi, who is also known as Haj Ali, may be in one or more of these photos.

"We know the Abu Ghraib torturers tied wires to Haj Ali's hands, placed him on a box, and sent electricity through his body," Burke told Salon in a statement, adding that she had sources for this account other than Qaissi. "The Abu Ghraib torturers are telling Salon that they never used electricity and photographed only the man nicknamed Gilligan, not the man nicknamed 'the Claw.' We do not trust the torturers."

The Times said on Saturday that Qaissi still maintains that he was forced to stand on a box, forced to wear a blanket, attached to wires and given electric shocks. An analysis of the photographs obtained by Salon cast doubt on his claim that he can be seen in any of the five photographs.

In particular, a close-up photograph of "The Claw's" deformed left hand taken on the night of Nov. 4 shows a scar on the back of his palm, a white bracelet and an overgrown thumbnail. Two side pictures of the man attached to the wires, taken just minutes earlier according to CID, show a closely cropped thumbnail, no bracelet and no apparent scar. The other three pictures of a man on the box, including the one that Qaissi has claimed is not him, were taken by two different cameras in the same room within minutes of each other, according to CID. They show no clear evidence of a deformed left hand.

Before the Times story, Vanity Fair, the PBS program "NOW," and the German magazine Der Spiegel ran stories describing Qaissi's account of abuse with electrical wires. (In October 2005, Salon reprinted the Der Spiegel story.) But two freelance reporters contacted Salon this week to express surprise at Qaissi's account in the Times. Both said they had interviewed Qaissi extensively in 2004 and that he had not mentioned his abuse with electrical wires or his appearance in the iconic photograph.....

tecoyah · 03-19-2006, 11:54 AM

The above post is an example of a personal attack on another member, and will no longer be tolerated. If Host had formed his lengthly reply without the unsolicited affront directed at Ustwo, it might have kept this thread from closure. Unfortunately he did not do so, and instead focused on the personal beliefs of someone who thinks differently than himself.

No official warning....but the thread is closed

03-19-2006, 09:18 AM	#2 (permalink)
host Banned	You should have posted only the link to the nytimes article, not the entire text. After seven days, the article becomes inaccessible to the non-paying public. Then....out of sight, out of mind! Many of the original articles that I've posted on these threads are no longer available for public viewing, or are difficult to locate and reference to their originally published sources. A few can be retrieved at truthout. org, but if they are linked from "there", they are reflexively "tarred" with the dreaded "guerilla op-ed" label, discredited merely by association. Even in this forum, undocumented chit-chat, passed off as legitimate and accurate argument, seems to be an adequate way to contribute to political discussion. The problem for me is that it isn't enough. It's almost always uninformed or underinformed opinion. The quality of the discussion and the accuracy, descends to a level below what I observe, for example, on the sexual advice and technique threads found elsewhere on TFP. It doesn't only happen here, it's a problem that affects the entire opinion shaping process in the U.S. Talking points, political rhetoric, mixed with a foundation of prejudices, work their "magic" by turning out masses of folks who earnestly believe that they know WTF they are talking about. The problem is that the opposite is true, and "they" vote for a guy who touts Jay-zuss as his "favorite philosopher", and then pursues policies of aggressive war, torture, and other crimes against humanity, and against the constitution that he took an oath to uphold. The only way, IMO, to present the nytimes article above, accompanied by the comments that you made, roachboy....on a politcal forum, especially considering that the article will "disappear" in a week...is the way you did it. Last edited by host; 03-19-2006 at 09:58 AM..

03-19-2006, 09:22 AM	#3 (permalink)
roachboy Super Moderator Location: essex ma	but the subscription is free for this...it is not in the pay section of the nyt....will the text be rexed after a week? __________________ a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear it make you sick. -kamau brathwaite

03-19-2006, 09:59 AM	#5 (permalink)
roachboy Super Moderator Location: essex ma	huh--so ustwo, i assume that for you a series of conclusions follow from the near non-sequitor you posted--the article is not about the photos from abu ghraib---but if i overlook the non-sequitor character of your post and work out where you could be going, it seems that your "argument" is because the nytimes misidentified who was behind the hood in that photo, then anything it publishes about torture in iraq is invalild? it is not surprising that you do not actually state this conclusion--which is the only one inferrable. i dont see much in it except an attempt to reduce dissonance. personal aside: i would imagine that you would see in this something problematic, were you to step outside the usual character ustwo plays and think about what is presented. call me pollyanna, but i do not imagine that ustwo encompasses all of who you--the person who makes ustwo happen---are or how you view the world, any more than roachboy encompasses all i am or how i think about the world. it would be interesting to get a glimpse of how that other guy, the 3-d guy, operates sometime. judging from your posts in other spaces here, it seems that ustwo in politics is a narrow construct. i sometimes undertand how ustwo in politics works and why he is as he is, but not in this case. i suspect it must be difficult holding the ustwo persona in politics together sometimes--but that is a simple speculation on my part. no idea what kind of response i am looking for, or if one is required. i am just a bit baffled by the move above, and curious about what motivates it--and more generally how you see this ustwo persona, what you see it as doing, how it works and why. __________________ a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear it make you sick. -kamau brathwaite

03-19-2006, 11:54 AM	#7 (permalink)
tecoyah Illusionary	The above post is an example of a personal attack on another member, and will no longer be tolerated. If Host had formed his lengthly reply without the unsolicited affront directed at Ustwo, it might have kept this thread from closure. Unfortunately he did not do so, and instead focused on the personal beliefs of someone who thinks differently than himself. No official warning....but the thread is closed __________________ Holding onto anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burned. - Buddha