Asia news sources are reporting that four people have been arrested in connection with last week's decapitation of Nicholas Berg. No identities have been released, but reportedly, Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi is not among them.

Four people were arrested over the beheading of US businessman Nicholas Berg, an Iraqi source said, as top officials at the funeral of Iraq's slain Governing Council president vowed not to cave in to terrorists. The source said four people were held over Berg's murder in a possible breakthrough in the US-led battle against extremists that have been trying to undermine efforts to transfer sovereignty to Iraqis on June 30.

The U.S. says it has not received any arrest information:

But Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, deputy director of operations, said: "We have no information from the coalition that any arrests were made today."

ABC News is reporting there is a military cover-up going on in the Abu Ghraib prison scandal.

Dozens of soldiers — other than the seven military police reservists who have been charged — were involved in the abuse at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison, and there is an effort under way in the Army to hide it, a key witness in the investigation told ABCNEWS.

by TChris

Recognizing that the U.S. squandered its human rights credibility by abusing prisoners in Iraq and elsewhere, the State Department made the realistic judgment that its report on human rights might not be taken seriously by the rest of the world. It delayed the report's release until today, but -- with good reason -- the rest of the world is entitled to think the U.S. needs to correct its own behavior before it points fingers at others.

Charges in the report against countries who abuse prisoners bear striking similarities to those being leveled against the United States around the world. For example, the report summarized Saudi Arabia's "poor" human rights record with these words: "Security forces continued to torture and abuse detainees and prisoners, arbitrarily arrest and detain persons and detain them incommunicado."

The report also criticizes countries for restricting freedom of the press -- exactly what the U.S. did when it temporarily closed the Iraqi newspaper Al Hawse.

If abuse of prisoners, indefinite detentions, and interference with a free press deserve criticism (and they do), the State Department might want to draft an addendum measuring the U.S. by the yardstick it applies to others. As one observor notes, the U.S. should not "be the policeman for the world" without adhering "to the same human rights standards they hold for others."

See the Forest quotes UPI analyst Martin Sieff who writes about the dissension over Rumsfeld within the Administration. STF concludes Rumsfeld is toast and will take the fall for the Bush Administration to try and save the election.

The first lawsuit against the U.S. military for damages for torture at Abu Ghraib prison has been filed by an Iraqi (who is also a Swedish citizen) in Michigan, where he is now staying with his mother and relatives:

An Iraqi-born Swedish citizen claiming to have been tortured at Abu Ghraib prison is seeking more than $100,000 from the American military. A Michigan lawyer filed a claim with the Army last Wednesday on behalf of the man, identified in the filing only as Mr. Saleh. "Hopefully we'll reach an amicable settlement, and if not we'll seek relief in federal court," said the lawyer, Shereef H. Akeel.

Mr. Saleh was interviewed over the weekend but is no longer speaking with the media. This article says he is the naked hooded prisoner in the photo with Lynndie England pointing at his genitals. Here's his story:

Saleh said he remembers the names of his tormentors and plans to file lawsuits against them. The Army has already charged two of them, Cpl. Charles A. Graner and Staff Sgt. Ivan Frederick II. Besides Graner and Frederick, Saleh recalls others only by partial names or nicknames: a sergeant named Schneider, another named Pearl, and "Nicolai" - one of the intelligence officers who he says directed the torture in Cellblock I/A, where he spent all but one month of his time in Abu Ghraib. "One of them wore glasses and one urinated on me," Saleh said Saturday at the office of an Iraqi human rights organization.

Saleh said he had been tortured at Abu Ghraib before under Saddam, when he refused to serve in the military, and his treatment by Americans was way worse:

The LA Times reports on the sworn testimony of the prison guards at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. More grisly details have emerged.

First, the latest from SPC Lynndie England:

England told investigators that guards forced detainees to crawl on their hands and knees on broken glass, threw a nerf football at handcuffed prisoners and forced male detainees to wear women's "maxi pads."

She also said Graner, with whom she is now pregnant, applied needle and thread to prisoners after beating them. "Cpl. Graner would personally stitch up detainees if the wound weren't too bad," she said. "He would take pictures of his work. One particular incident Cpl. Graner ran a former Iraqi general into a wall and split his lip. Cpl. Graner stitched up his lip."

Next, remember this photo of a dead Iraqi?

Here's what happened to him:

A bomb went off near a U.S. convoy in Iraq today that contained nerve gas.

A roadside bomb containing deadly sarin nerve agent exploded near a U.S. military convoy, the U.S. military said Monday. It was believed to be the first confirmed finding of any of the banned weapons upon which the United States based its case for the Iraq war. Two people were treated for ''minor exposure,'' but no serious injuries were reported.

The deadly chemical was inside an artillery shell dating to the Saddam Hussein era that had been rigged as a bomb in Baghdad, said Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, the chief military spokesman in Iraq....[A spokesman for the Iraq Survey Group] believed that insurgents who rigged the artillery shell as a bomb didn't know it contained the nerve agent, and that the dispersal of the nerve agent from such a rigged device was very limited....It was unclear if the sarin shell was from chemical rounds that the United Nations had tagged and marked for destruction before the U.S. invasion.

Update: Weapons inspectors say it's not a sign that Iraq had stockpiled WMD.

by TChris

Abdel-Zahraa Othman, a/k/a Izzadine Saleem, was killed in a Baghdad car bombing. Othman was serving as president of the Iraqi Governing Council. He is the second member of the Council to be assassinated.

Last week we wrote about Lane McCotter, the former Texas and Utah prison chief whom Ashcroft picked to head up Abu Ghraib. The Houston Chronicle keeps the story alive, and says New York Senator Charles Schumer is asking Ashcroft for an investigation into how McCotter, who also headed up the Texas prison system during a "bad period" and some private prisons, got the job.

A civilian charged with preparing Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison for U.S. military use headed the Texas prison system during one of its most controversial periods and later resigned as director of Utah prisons after an inmate died while shackled naked to a chair....McCotter spent 18 months administering the Texas system, a period when prison violence made frequent headlines and Justice was threatening to fine the state as much as $1,000 a day if it did not make court-ordered improvements in the system.

....Sen. Charles Schumer, D-New York, is urging Attorney General John Ashcroft to investigate how civilians such as McCotter were chosen to oversee the opening of prisons in Iraq -- noting that McCotter is an executive for a company operating a private prison in New Mexico that the Justice Department criticized last year for unsafe conditions and lack of medical care for inmates.

If Ashcroft and the Justice Department were responsible for McCotter's selection, why isn't Schumer calling for an independent investigation by persons outside DOJ?

Schumer wants to know how someone with McCotter's "checkered record" was appointed to the team Ashcroft dispatched to Iraq to help rebuild its judicial system. "There are many questions begging for answers," Schumer said last week. "Mr. McCotter 's selection also raises serious questions about the role that was played by civilian advisers in setting prison policies, designing training programs for prison guards and directly influencing the environment in which the horrible abuses at Abu Ghraib took place."

The Herald (UK) is reporting that President Bush and British PM Tony Blair have been accelerating exit plans from Iraq:

The prime minister's spokesman, insisting that Mr Blair was not diverted by speculation over his future but was concentrating on getting the job done, denied the new strategy was a panic measure to silence the anti-war critics on both sides of the Atlantic.

He said: "They have been working on a joint strategy for the last few weeks and it has speeded up in the last few days. It is a recognition that people need to see we have a grip, that we are not there for ever amen, politically or militarily. "Neither is this a case of cutting and running, but showing we have a strategy of achieving what we said we wanted to achieve: the transfer of authority to an Iraqi government and responsibility to an Iraqi security system."

The New York Times reports that in her sworn statement to investigators, PFC Lynndie England said of the abuse heaped on Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib:

Pfc. Lynndie England explained the mystery of why soldiers at Abu Ghraib took pictures of detainees masturbating and piled naked with plastic sandbags over their heads by saying, "We thought it looked funny so pictures were taken." Private England's statement, made May 5, narrates the graphic photographs now at the center of the prison abuse scandal in specific detail and a matter-of-fact tone, describing the abuse as routine and sometimes amusing, but almost never, to her mind, out of bounds. [our emphasis]

Remember this picture of her leading the prisoner by the leash? That was no momentary encounter.

She explains how she put a strap around a detainee's neck and forced him and others to run and crawl down a hallway for "approximately four to six hours;" how one soldier would regularly throw a Nerf football at detainees with bags over their heads "to scare them;" how one soldier would kick detainees and cause open wounds, then "would personally stitch detainees if the wound weren't too bad," according to a copy of her statement given to The New York Times. [our emphasis]

As to her conduct and that of her co-guards:

Asked if she ever physically abused a detainee, Private England said, "Yes, I stepped on some of them, push them or pull them, but nothing extreme." She described how Staff Sgt. Ivan L. Frederick II punched detainees, "and the normal stuff as far as lean on them or push them." "He also played some mind games with some of them with chemical lights," she added. "He would tell them to lift their legs and place the chemical light under their feet and tell them it was a knife. The chemical light would then be broken and spilled on the ground, the detainee would then be forced to crawl through it and then placed in a dark cell, this would freak out the detainee because they would glow."

More about the guards' amusement:

Update: Pentagon denies that Rumsfeld or other officials approved operations that led to the interrogation methods used on Iraqi prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison, the Defense Department said.

Update: The Iraqi detainees released Friday from the Abu Ghraib prison are urging the issuance of an international arrest warrant for U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his trial over their abuse.

***************
Original Post:

Seymour Hersh of the New Yorker, who wrote this ground-breaking article on the Iraqi prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib, does it again with his new article on a secret program approved by the Pentagon that encouraged physical coercion and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners.

The roots of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal lie not in the criminal inclinations of a few Army reservists but in a decision, approved last year by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, to expand a highly secret operation, which had been focussed on the hunt for Al Qaeda, to the interrogation of prisoners in Iraq. Rumsfeld's decision embittered the American intelligence community, damaged the effectiveness of élite combat units, and hurt America's prospects in the war on terror.

According to interviews with several past and present American intelligence officials, the Pentagon's operation, known inside the intelligence community by several code words, including Copper Green, encouraged physical coercion and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners in an effort to generate more intelligence about the growing insurgency in Iraq. A senior C.I.A. official, in confirming the details of this account last week, said that the operation stemmed from Rumsfeld's long-standing desire to wrest control of America's clandestine and paramilitary operations from the C.I.A.

[link via Atrios]

Update: Here's a Reuters article discussing the New Yorker article. And Memeorandum has a compilation of blog coverage on it.

Update: The Hersh article is the story of the day--Associated Press; CNN; over 1400 articles on Google already.