The Senate Armed Services committee has been waiting for several weeks for the Pentagon to provide its inspector general’s report on prisoner abuse in Iraq and Afghanistan. Miraculously, it made it to the Committee this morning.
The U.S. military has found a total of 94 cases of confirmed or alleged abuse of prisoners by U.S. soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan since the fall of 2001, the Army’s inspector general said Thursday in a long-awaited report made public at a hastily called Senate hearing.
The Pentagon had refused until now to give a total number of abuse allegations since the prisoner abuse scandal broke this spring. The 94 number is significantly higher than all other previous estimates given by Pentagon officials.
Raise your hand if you’re surprised that there were far more abuses than the administration had been willing to admit.
And if you thought the timing of the Berger leak was suspicious, how about the timing of finally releasing this information on the exact same morning that the 9/11 Commission report gets released?