Those who still deny the clear record of administration-sanctioned abuse and torture in Iraq may eventually have to concede on these latest revelations:
Placards posted by soldiers at the detention area advised, "NO BLOOD, NO FOUL." The slogan, as one Defense Department official explained, reflected an adage adopted by Task Force 6-26: "If you don’t make them bleed, they can’t prosecute for it." According to Pentagon specialists who worked with the unit, prisoners at Camp Nama often disappeared into a detention black hole, barred from access to lawyers or relatives, and confined for weeks without charges. "The reality is, there were no rules there," another Pentagon official said.
Did Task Force 6-26 believed it was violating the wishes and commands of its commander-in-chief and defense secretary? Clearly, other government entities knew what was going on but looked the other way or couldn’t stop the torture:
The abuses at Camp Nama continued despite warnings beginning in August 2003 from an Army investigator and American intelligence and law enforcement officials in Iraq. The Central Intelligence Agency was concerned enough to bar its personnel from Camp Nama that August.
To recap: we have a president who for the first time decrees that torture and abuse is legal in the U.S. military if "military necessity" allows it; we have White House memos saying that anything short of death and major organ failure cannot be categorized as "torture"; we have "cruel, inhuman and degrading conduct" at Gitmo, conduct that is subsequently declared within military guidelines; we have the head of, in John Podhoretz’s phrase, the "excesses at Gitmo" assigned to Abu Ghraib to "Gitmoize" it; we have an outbreak across every theater of war of brutal torture and abuse practices; and we have what is a clear directive from Washington to get better intelligence on the insurgency – and fast. We now have much clearer evidence of an elite, secret unit setting up what can only be called a torture camp, and no one in authority seems able to put an end to it.
"Some former task force members said the Nama in the camp’s name stood for a coarse phrase that soldiers used to describe the compound. One Defense Department specialist recalled seeing pink blotches on detainees’ clothing as well as red welts on their bodies, marks he learned later were inflicted by soldiers who used detainees as targets and called themselves the High Five Paintball Club."
No, these aren’t Milosevic’s thugs; they’re Bush’s and Cheney’s and Addington’s and Gonzales’ and Rumsfeld’s. More to the point: they’re ours. And can anyone enlighten me on what "Nama" really means? The NYT seems to squeamish to explain. I’m not.
The Dish 