First Amnesty International, now the Red Cross:

The international Red Cross says the abuse it found in Iraq's US-run prisons was systematic and amounted to torture, adding that it first raised concerns with the United States more than a year ago. At a quickly-arranged news conference, the International Committee of the Red Cross' director of operations, Pierre Kraehenbuehl, said US authorities had broken international laws and their transgressions had been documented in an ICRC report. "The elements we found were tantamount to torture... There were clearly incidents of degrading and inhuman treatment," he told reporters.

Democracy of One writes that the Bush Administration's culture is responsible for the abuse of Iraqi prisoners:

It is the contempt for due process and civil liberties by Bush and other administration officials that has led to the culture of impunity under which these abuses have occurred. The culture of any organization starts at the top, and lower ranking members take the lead from those above them. In the administration’s bluster to protect America by suspending civil liberties, they unwittingly fostered an environment where gross violations of international law and human decency were tacitly, though not explicitly condoned. While direct orders from top military brass surely were never given to rape, murder and sexually humilate prisoners, these acts are the result of administration policies that lack transparency and accountability

The Taguba report is curious in its failure to discuss Major General Barbara Fast who was the chief intelligence officer at Abu Ghraib prison.

...except for one brief mention, the 55-page report contains nothing about the role of the top military intelligence officer in Iraq, Maj. Gen. Barbara Fast. As head of intelligence for the U.S. command in Baghdad, Fast was in charge of interrogators at Abu Ghraib, where prisoners were beaten, sodomized and photographed in sexually degrading positions.

Experts contacted by the St. Petersburg Times say strict adherence to military protocol - and a possible reluctance to delve too far into intelligence operations - have kept Fast out of the spotlight....That the investigation into prisoner abuse was conducted by a major general may be one reason why Fast, an officer of equal rank, apparently has undergone little scrutiny, one expert says.

There's more in this long Sunday New York Times article, In Abuse, a Picture of G.I.'s Ill Prepared and Overwhelmed. The article also contains statements from the individual guards.

Officials already seem to be backtracking on their arrest of Brandon Mayfield, the Portland, Oregon immigration and family law attorney (and former lieutenant in the U.S. army) arrested on a material witness warrant in connection with the March, 2004 Spain train bombings:

The law enforcement officials said they were afraid that Mr. Mayfield, who is originally from Kansas, might become a fugitive if he knew he was under suspicion. So monitoring that was just getting started was abruptly halted. Mr. Mayfield was arrested before investigators had fully examined his phone records, before they knew if he had ever met with any of the bombing suspects, before they knew if he had ever traveled to Spain or elsewhere overseas. His relatives said he had not been out of the United States for 10 years.

As to the purported fingerprint of Mayfield on a plastic bag in a van containing detonators, it turns out the F.B.I. isn't sure it's a match:

The New York Times says the father of Ivan Frederick, of one of the prison guards being investigated for abuse, fearful his son would be a scapegoat, contacted his brother-in law-, William Lawson, who contacted "retired Colonel and muckraker David Hackworth," who put the father in touch with the '60 Minutes II' producers.

Rumsfeld to Congress yesterday: "I wish I had been able to convey to them the gravity of this before we saw it in the media,"

The irony, Mr. Lawson said, is that the public spectacle might have been avoided if the military and the federal government had been responsive to his claims that his nephew was simply following orders. Mr. Lawson said he sent letters to 17 members of Congress about the case earlier this year, with virtually no response, and that he ultimately contacted Mr. Hackworth's Web site out of frustration, leading him to cooperate with a consultant for "60 Minutes II."

....He shared his frustration in his March 23 e-mail message to Mr. Hackworth's Web site, writing: "We have contacted the Red Cross, Congress both parties, Bill O'Reilly and many others. Nobody wants to touch this."

"The Army had the opportunity for this not to come out, not to be on 60 Minutes," he said. "But the Army decided to prosecute those six G.I.'s because they thought me and my family were a bunch of poor, dirt people who could not do anything about it. But unfortunately, that was not the case."

How did the photos get to Ivan Frederick's father?

This is just awful....in today's Guardian....showing the guards were taught how to commit the indecencies they perpetuated on Iraqi prisoners.

The sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison was not an invention of maverick guards, but part of a system of ill-treatment and degradation used by special forces soldiers that is now being disseminated among ordinary troops and contractors who do not know what they are doing, according to British military sources. The techniques devised in the system, called R2I - resistance to interrogation - match the crude exploitation and abuse of prisoners at the Abu Ghraib jail in Baghdad.

One former British special forces officer who returned last week from Iraq, said: "It was clear from discussions with US private contractors in Iraq that the prison guards were using R2I techniques, but they didn't know what they were doing." He said British and US military intelligence soldiers were trained in these techniques, which were taught at the joint services interrogation centre in Ashford, Kent, now transferred to the former US base at Chicksands. "There is a reservoir of knowledge about these interrogation techniques which is retained by former special forces soldiers who are being rehired as private contractors in Iraq. Contractors are bringing in their old friends".

Amnesty International has written this open letter to President George W. Bush on the question of torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment of Iraqi prisoners. As to the Taguba report, the letter says:

The Taguba report emphasized that the findings were "amply" supported by confessions from suspected perpetrators, statements from detainees and witnesses, as well as "extremely graphic photographic evidence". The report found that there was a failure to establish clear training, procedures and oversight on interrogation and treatment of detainees, and "that very little instruction or training" was provided to military police personnel on the applicable rules of the Geneva Conventions.

....The Taguba report presents evidence that the abuse allegedly inflicted on the detainees in Iraq followed requests from military intelligence and other government interrogators that the military police (MP) guards in the prison "set physical and mental conditions for favourable interrogation of witnesses". Guards alleged that military intelligence personnel had given instructions including "loosen this guy up for us", "make sure he has a bad night"; "make sure he gets the treatment"; and "Good job, they're breaking down real fast. They answer every question. They're giving out good information, Finally, and Keep up the good work. Stuff like that."

Amnesty recounts the pattern of abuses it reported to the Administration over a long period of time.

The New York Times reports Saturday on the routine mistreatment of prisoners in America. After setting out numerous sickening examples, the article reverts back to Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, and we learn that the man who was responsible for directing the re-opening of the Abu Ghraib prison after the U.S. invaded Iraq, and for training the guards, was Lane McCotter of Utah, who was selected for the job by none other than Attorney General John Ashcroft.

[McCotter] resigned under pressure as director of the Utah Department of Corrections in 1997 after an inmate died while shackled to a restraining chair for 16 hours. The inmate, who suffered from schizophrenia, was kept naked the whole time.....McCotter later became an executive of a private prison company, one of whose jails was under investigation by the Justice Department when he was sent to Iraq as part of a team of prison officials, judges, prosecutors and police chiefs picked by Attorney General John Ashcroft to rebuild the country's criminal justice system....In Utah, in addition to the death of the mentally ill inmate, Mr. McCotter also came under criticism for hiring a prison psychiatrist whose medical license was on probation and who was accused of Medicaid fraud and writing prescriptions for drug addicts.

Mr. McCotter, 63, is director of business development for Management & Training Corporation, a Utah-based firm that says it is the third-largest private prison company, operating 13 prisons. In 2003, the company's operation of the Santa Fe jail was criticized by the Justice Department and the New Mexico Department of Corrections for unsafe conditions and lack of medical care for inmates. No further action was taken.

McCotter reports he left Abu Ghraib after training the guards and cutting the ribbon at the opening ceremony last September. As for Ashcroft, who picked McCotter,

When Mr. Ashcroft announced the appointment of the team to restore Iraq's criminal justice system last year, including Mr. McCotter, he said, "Now all Iraqis can taste liberty in their native land, and we will help make that freedom permanent by assisting them to establish an equitable criminal justice system based on the rule of law and standards of basic human rights."

Then there's this quote, which turns out to be quite prescient:

Sabrina Harman is one of the U.S. soldiers who have been charged with abusing Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison and who will face court martial proceedings. Harman was interviewed by e-mail from Iraq this week.

[She] said she was assigned to break down prisoners for interrogation. "They would bring in one to several prisoners at a time already hooded and cuffed," Harman said in interviews by e-mail this week from Baghdad. "The job of the MP was to keep them awake, make it hell so they would talk." She said her military police unit took direction from the military intelligence officers in charge of the facility and from civilian contractors there who conducted interrogations.

Harman's face is now famous as belonging to one of the soldiers who posed in a widely published photograph showing naked Iraqi detainees stacked in a pyramid....She also is charged with striking several detainees by jumping on a pile of detainees, writing "rapeist" on a prisoner's leg and with attaching wires to a prisoner's hands while he stood on a box with his head covered, according to Army charging documents. She is accused of then telling him if he fell off the box he would be electrocuted.

During his testimony today, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld warned that more photographs of U.S. soldiers abusing Iraqi prisoners would be released shortly--and that they were worse than those we've seen to date --depicting "sadistic, cruel and inhumane" acts.

NBC describes the as-yet unreleased photos:

U.S. military officials told NBC News that the unreleased images showed U.S. soldiers severely beating an Iraqi prisoner nearly to death, having sex with a female Iraqi prisoner and “acting inappropriately with a dead body.” The officials said there was also a videotape, apparently shot by U.S. personnel, showing Iraqi guards raping young boys.

Here's another column suggesting Bush is wrong to say prison abuse is inconsistent with the nature and temperment of Americans:

President Bush is entirely mistaken --180 degrees wrong -- when he says the abuse inflicted by U.S. soldiers on Iraqis at Abu Ghraib prison doesn't "reflect the hearts of the American people.'' Of course it does.

This is not to slur Americans. It reflects our hearts because it reflects all human hearts, in general. The potential to be cruel, to take advantage of situations, to abuse power, is lodged deep within the souls of, if not everyone, then practically everyone, and those who deny it are either oblivious or hypocrites or self-proclaimed saints.

[hat tip to Ted from Chicago]

by TChris

President Bush reportedly chastised Donald Rumsfeld for not giving him a full briefing on the extent to which U.S. soldiers abused Iraqi prisoners. But Rumsfeld isn't the only person who knew about the scandal. Doesn't Paul Bremer also deserve a scolding for burying his head in the sand?

Interesting questions were posed today during a briefing in Iraq.

Q Yeah, Dan (last name inaudible), The Washington Post. For Dan. You said, if I understood you correctly, that in January Ambassador Bremer heard about the Abu Ghraib issue when it was made public. I'm not aware that it was made public then, and it certainly wasn't made public here in Iraq. Could you tell me why, between January and now, or the last week or so, neither you nor Ambassador Bremer stood up at this podium to expose this issue to the Iraqi public with whom you're working so closely with?

MR. SENOR: Well, first of all, it was. A press statement was issued in January on this particular issue -- General Kimmitt can speak to the details -- and has been public since then. And to your second point, Ambassador Bremer on multiple occasions in meetings with Iraqi people, including public events, he has expressed his outrage about this particular issue. In fact, even as recently as yesterday, Ambassador Bremer appeared on Al-Iraqiyah, in which he had an interview with several Iraqi journalists, and about half the program was dedicated to this subject, and he addressed many of the issues you raise.

Q ...When did Ambassador Bremer see those photos?

MR. SENOR: I do not know when he saw the photos. I just know that he was made aware of the issue in January of 2004.

Does everyone who should be talking to the President follow the same rule? "Don't tell him anything that might upset him."

by TChris

Mexico has long maintained that Mexicans who commit crimes in the United States should not be executed when the U.S. failed to notify them of their right to request assistance from the Mexican consul, as the Vienna Convention requires. A recent ruling from the United Nations International Court of Justice supports that claim.

Mexico pressed its position before the Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board today in the case of Osbaldo Torres. Torres is scheduled to die on May 18. In a rare victory for international relations, however, the Board recommended clemency for Torres. His fate is now in the hands of Oklahoma Governor Brad Henry.