The ACLU has fed the papers more information.
The Bush administration is facing a wave of new allegations that the abuse of foreign detainees in U.S. military custody was more widespread, varied and grave in the past three years than the Defense Department has long maintained.
New documents released yesterday detail a series of probes by Army criminal investigators into multiple cases of threatened executions of Iraqi detainees by U.S. soldiers, as well as of thefts of currency and other private property, physical assaults, and deadly shootings of detainees at detention camps in Iraq.
[…]
The variety of the abuse and the fact that it occurred over a three-year period undermine the Pentagon’s past insistence — arising out of the summertime scandal surrounding the mistreatment at Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib prison — that the abuse occurred largely during a few months at that prison, and that it mostly involved detainee humiliation or intimidation rather than the deliberate infliction of pain.
OK, so how does our morally-responsible White House respond? From Scott McClellan’s briefing yesterday:
“The President expects that there — if there are allegations of abuse, that those allegations need to be taken seriously. They need to be fully investigated, people need to be held accountable and brought to justice if they’re involved in wrongdoing, and that preventative measures and corrective measures are put in place to prevent it from happening again.”
It sounds encouraging that the president wants the widespread torture to be “taken seriously” and “investigated,” but that’s not what’s happening.
As Eric Umansky noted this morning:
[E]verybody notes that the White House promised that there will be an investigation. But [I didn’t] see the papers mention a related point: There has been no independent or overarching investigation of the abuses, and the administration has opposed the creation of one.
And therein lies the point. McClellan was, no doubt, just spinning his way through another briefing yesterday, repeating talking points about concern for “justice” and “corrective measures.” But if White House officials were serious, the president could immediately call for an independent investigation of what clearly has been a systemic problem of torture in several theaters for three years.
I’m not holding my breath.