A military police commander at Abu Ghraib prison will testify that the top US general in Iraq witnessed some of the abuses.

The lawyer, Capt. Robert Shuck, said he was told that Army Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez and other senior military officers were aware of what was taking place on Tier 1A of Abu Ghraib. Shuck is assigned to defend Staff Sgt. Ivan L. "Chip" Frederick II of the 372nd Military Police Company. During an April 2 hearing that was open to the public, Shuck said the company commander, Capt. Donald J. Reese, was prepared to testify in exchange for immunity. The military prosecutor questioned Shuck about what Reese would say under oath.

"Are you saying that Captain Reese is going to testify that General Sanchez was there and saw this going on?" asked Capt. John McCabe, the military prosecutor. "That's what he told me," Shuck said. "I am an officer of the court, sir, and I would not lie. I have got two children at home. I'm not going to risk my career."

Stirling Newberry, posting at Daily Kos, tells us what to remember about Ahmed Chalabi:

Bush Sr. Created the INC
Clinton fired the INC in 1996 after a failed coup attempt and bad information.
The Republican Congress brought them back.
The civilian leadership of DoD - Wolfowitz, Perle and Rumsfeld - made Chalabi the key player.
The INC had no presence in Iran until after Bush took office, and only had a relationship with Iran of any consequence after Hakim's assassination.
Chalabi and Dawa formed an alliance, causing Chalabi to shift towards Islamicism.
The attempt to cashier Chalabi is clearly attached to either building his prestige, or to distance Bush from him - either way, he needs to be pinned on Clinton.
The PNACers cannot distance themselves from him - he is the key figure in the creation of their Iraq.
Chalabi associates have a track record of getting big contracts from the Iraq war, and a track record of overpromising and under delivering.
Chalabi is a convicted felon, and no amount of seething charm will change this. Switzerland doesn't go after people at Saddam's request - so long as the money is clean when they get it, they will do business with almost anyone.

The latest scandal to hit the Bush Administration following Abu Ghraib is that of the fall of Ahmed Chalabi. Josh Marshall of TalkingPoints Memo is covering it, his latest is here and here.

Alexander Cockburn has an in-depth, insightful review at Counterpunch.

Why the US Turned Against Their Former Golden Boy -- He was Preparing a Coup! What He Did as a Catspaw for Tehran: How He Nearly Bankrupted Jordan; the Billions He Stands to Make Out of the New Iraq.

The story becomes more important following the Bush Administration's decision to raid Chalabi's home and seize his files and amidst reports that Chalabi was giving American military secrets to Iran. As to the connection between Rumsfeld and Chalabi, go here.

TChris has been following Chalabi as well, here, here and here.

Kevin Drum at Political Animal forecast Chalabi's demise in April.

This story has legs, keep an eye on it.

Renowned author and photographer Susan Sontag has an excellent article in the Sunday New York Times Magazine, "The Torture of Others." Some highlights:

The issue is not whether a majority or a minority of Americans performs such acts but whether the nature of the policies prosecuted by this administration and the hierarchies deployed to carry them out makes such acts likely.

....So, then, is the real issue not the photographs themselves but what the photographs reveal to have happened to ''suspects'' in American custody? No: the horror of what is shown in the photographs cannot be separated from the horror that the photographs were taken -- with the perpetrators posing, gloating, over their helpless captives. German soldiers in the Second World War took photographs of the atrocities they were committing in Poland and Russia, but snapshots in which the executioners placed themselves among their victims are exceedingly rare, as may be seen in a book just published, ''Photographing the Holocaust,'' by Janina Struk. If there is something comparable to what these pictures show it would be some of the photographs of black victims of lynching taken between the 1880's and 1930's, which show Americans grinning beneath the naked mutilated body of a black man or woman hanging behind them from a tree. The lynching photographs were souvenirs of a collective action whose participants felt perfectly justified in what they had done. So are the pictures from Abu Ghraib.

by TChris

As TalkLeft noted in March, Staff Sgt. Camilo Mejia refused to return to Iraq after deciding that he couldn't further an immoral war. The price of that decision: conviction of desertion in a court martial, a year in prison, and a bad-conduct discharge at the end of his prison term.

Sergeant Mejia, 28, has said his experience in Iraq, seeing brutality, senseless deaths and commanders who he said put glory over good decisions, convinced him that the war was "oil driven" and immoral.

After Mejia refused to return to Iraq, he applied for conscientious objector status, but the military recognizes only an objection to war in general, not an objection to specific conflicts. Mejia wasn't allowed to use that application as a defense, nor was he allowed to testify about the mistreatment of detainees that he witnessed.

The Washington Post is reporting that previously secret documents now being released show that the Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison were not being abused to soften them up for interrogation, but were being done as punishment and amusement .

The information comes in part from the guards themselves. One guard said:

He said that he asked Graner, a Pennsylvania prison guard in civilian life, about the photographs. Graner replied: "The Christian in me says it's wrong, but the corrections officer in me says, 'I love to make a grown man piss himself.' "

....All the MPs who provided statements also described abuses that appeared to have little to do with intelligence gathering. Instead, they said detainees were beaten and sexually humiliated as punishment or for fun.

Here's a few of the stories behind the photos:

• The Naked Pyramid Photo: "I was laughing at some of the stuff."
• Punches and Kicks Photo: "Knocked the Detainee Unconscious."
• The Dogs Photo: "They Let the Dogs Corner Him."

Some examples of the abuse:

This is pretty amazing. The Department of Justice wrote several memos to Pentagon officials advising them how to avoid being charged with war crimes while denying prisoners their rights.

A series of Justice Department memorandums written in late 2001 and the first few months of 2002 were crucial in building a legal framework for United States officials to avoid complying with international laws and treaties on handling prisoners, lawyers and former officials say.

The confidential memorandums, several of which were written or co-written by John C. Yoo, a University of California law professor who was serving in the department, provided arguments to keep United States officials from being charged with war crimes for the way prisoners were detained and interrogated. They were endorsed by top lawyers in the White House, the Pentagon and the vice president's office but drew dissents from the State Department.

The memorandums .....suggested how officials could inoculate themselves from liability by claiming that abused prisoners were in some other nation's custody.

And don't miss this editorial in the June 8 issue of The Nation, Orders to Torture (subscription required):

The Pentagon released some figures today about the number of Iraqi and Afghan prisoner deaths being investigated for possible criminal prosecution: The total is now 37.

The Army has undertaken criminal investigations into the deaths of at least 32 Iraqis and five Afghans held by U.S. forces since August 2002, Pentagon officials revealed Friday. The deaths are from 33 separate cases, two of which involved more than one death. That is eight more cases than the Pentagon had publicly reported two weeks ago.

Nine are active cases, and eight of those are classified as homicides involving suspected assaults of detainees before or during interrogation sessions. Two have been resolved as homicide cases. Four are called justifiable homicides and 15 have been classified as deaths by natural or undetermined cause, the Pentagon said. Of the total of 33 cases, 30 involve detainees who died inside a U.S.-run detention facility. In the three other cases, two Iraqis and one Afghani died while under U.S. control outside a facility.

Earlier this month, the the Pentagon acknowledged 25 deaths. So more are still coming out of the woodwork.

The Washington Post has them.. Statements describing sexual humiliation and savage beatings. And new photos.

The statements provide the most detailed picture yet of what took place on the cellblock. Some of the detainees described being abused as punishment or discipline after they were caught fighting or with a prohibited item. Some said they were pressed to denounce Islam or were force-fed pork and liquor. Many provided graphic details of how they were sexually humiliated and assaulted, threatened with rape, and forced to masturbate in front of female soldiers.

"They forced us to walk like dogs on our hands and knees," said Hiadar Sabar Abed Miktub al-Aboodi, detainee No. 13077. "We had to bark like a dog, and if we didn't do that they started hitting us hard on our face and chest with no mercy. After that, they took us to our cells, took the mattresses out and dropped water on the floor and they made us sleep on our stomachs on the floor with the bags on our head and they took pictures of everything."

Sean-Paul at Agonist reports this email from a reader who says that this Iranian website is reporting the following (Note that the Iranian website is not in English so we have no idea if that's what is really being reported.)

1. The site is in possession of "documents" that prove Berg was a CIA special agent who had initiated widespread contacts with Muslims resident in the US over the past two years, with the aim of penetrating Al-Qaeda.
2. Berg had been very successful in this mission, providing golden opportunities for the CIA and the FBI to deliver severe blows to Al-Qaeda.
3. With start of the Iraq war and Al-Qaeda's activities there, Berg was sent to Iraq under cover of a telecommunication businessman.

NBC News reports an exclusive --a new prison scandal in Iraq. The unit involved is the Delta Force:

U.S. military and intelligence officials familiar with the situation tell NBC News the Army’s elite Delta Force is now the subject of a Pentagon inspector general investigation into abuse against detainees. The target is a top-secret site near Baghdad’s airport. The battlefield interrogation facility known as the “BIF” is pictured in satellite photos.

According to two top U.S. government sources, it is the scene of the most egregious violations of the Geneva Conventions in all of Iraq’s prisons. A place where the normal rules of interrogation don’t apply, Delta Force’s BIF only holds Iraqi insurgents and suspected terrorists — but not the most wanted among Saddam’s lieutenants pictured on the deck of cards.

...the prisoners there are hooded from the moment they are captured. They are kept in tiny dark cells. And in the BIF’s six interrogation rooms, Delta Force soldiers routinely drug prisoners, hold a prisoner under water until he thinks he’s drowning, or smother them almost to suffocation.

One senior Pentagon official has denied the charges. Others have clammed up and refused to comment. But other officials say Rumsfeld tried to get the BIF tactics brought to Abu Ghraib:

The House of Representatives today voted to tear down Abu Graib prison in Iraq. The vote was 308-114 to include the tear-down provision in a $422 billion defense spending bill.

After the tear-down, we would pay to build a modern detention center in its place. The bill requires the consent of the new Iraqi Government because by the time the bill passes the Senate, it will be after June 30 and no longer our decision to make, says Congressman Curt Weldon, a Republican co-sponsor of the bill.

Really? That's not what the Walll Street Journal and New York Times have reported. Via Eric Alterman at Altercation:

If you are not buying the Journal every day during this scandal, you are missing the best non-Hersh reporting to come out of it. For instance today the Times has a much less informative and more administration friendly version of the story that Journal readers read a week ago, in which U.S. authorities admit in the fine print that the June 30 handover will be a ruse and that Americans will be running Iraq as much as ever. Today’s top story: “U.S. Generals Say No System Exists For Abuse Reports.”

Like Eric says, "don't feel guilty about skipping the editorial pages."