Over the weekend, we learned of a devastating new report prepared by Human Rights Watch documenting widespread and systematic abuse of detainees in Iraq. We’re not talking about “isolated incidents” by a few “bad apples.”
HRW’s report was prompted by three former soldiers with the 82nd Airborne, who felt compelled to come forward and explain that torture was not only routine, it was ordered by military intelligence officers.
An Army captain and two sergeants from the 82nd Airborne Division who were responsible for supervising prisoners in Iraq have come forward with allegations that members of the unit routinely beat, tortured and abused detainees in 2003 and early 2004. […]
Capt. Ian Fishback, a West Point graduate, contacted the Senate panel with the charges within the last 10 days, saying he was frustrated that his superior officers had failed to respond, said committee aides.
The HRW report, which isn’t for anyone with a weak stomach, notes, of course, that many of these Iraqi detainees hadn’t done anything wrong. But they were tortured anyway, in some cases, for soldiers’ “amusement.”
Why did Fishback and the two unnamed sergeants come forward? In part because they heard Rumsfeld claim that Abu Ghraib prompted a change in interrogation procedures — a claim they knew to be a lie.
And how does the Bush administration respond to this demoralizing new information? How else — by launching an inquiry to find out who divulged this embarrassing information.
An Army captain who reported new allegations of detainee abuse in Iraq said Tuesday that Army investigators seemed more concerned about tracking down young soldiers who reported misconduct than in following up the accusations and investigating whether higher-ranking officers knew of the abuses.
The officer, Capt. Ian Fishback, said investigators from the Criminal Investigation Command and the 18th Airborne Corps inspector general had pressed him to divulge the names of two sergeants from his former battalion who also gave accounts of abuse, which were made public in a report last Friday by the group Human Rights Watch.
Captain Fishback, speaking publicly on the matter for first time, said the investigators who have questioned him in the past 10 days seemed to be less interested in individuals he identified in his chain of command who allegedly committed the abuses.
“I’m convinced this is going in a direction that’s not consistent with why we came forward,” Captain Fishback said in a telephone interview from Fort Bragg, N.C., where he is going through Army Special Forces training. “We came forward because of the larger issue that prisoner abuse is systemic in the Army. I’m concerned this will take a new twist, and they’ll try to scapegoat some of the younger soldiers. This is a leadership problem.”
This is the administration’s m.o. in a nutshell. The problem, in the Bush gang’s mind, isn’t that military intelligence personnel ordered troops to break the legs of innocent Iraqis; it’s that someone tattled.
Keep in mind, Fishback tried to get his superiors to take action on his complaints for 17 months. They wouldn’t listen. Now that everyone is aware of the fiasco, the first order of business, apparently, is rooting out the sources of the information.
It certainly looks like the administration cares less about systematic human rights abuses and more about leaks and public relations problems. Again.