They Knew

Remember when Rumsfeld and Bush professed shock, shock at the abuses at Abu Ghraib, when they were revealed? Among the latest cache of released government docs, we discover the following:

The ACLU also released an Information Paper entitled ‘Allegations of Detainee Abuse in Iraq and Afghanistan’ dated April 2, 2004, two weeks before the world saw the pictures of torture at Abu Ghraib prison. The paper outlined the status of 62 investigations of detainee abuse and detainee deaths. Cases include assaults, punching, kicking and beatings, mock executions, sexual assault of a female detainee, threatening to kill an Iraqi child to ‘send a message to other Iraqis,’ stripping detainees, beating them and shocking them with a blasting device, throwing rocks at handcuffed Iraqi children, choking detainees with knots of their scarves and interrogations at gunpoint.
The ACLU said the document makes clear that while President Bush and other officials assured the world that what occurred at Abu Ghraib was the work of ‘a few bad apples,’ the government knew that abuse was happening in numerous facilities in Iraq and Afghanistan. Of the 62 cases being investigated at the time, at least 26 involved detainee deaths. Some of the cases had already gone through a court-martial proceeding. The abuses went beyond Abu Ghraib, and touched Camp Cropper, Camp Bucca and other detention centers in Mosul, Samarra, Baghdad, Tikrit, as well as Orgun-E in Afghanistan.

In one document, Sanchez is said to have given orders to take prisoners to "the outer limits" in interrogation. One investigation, to pick one out of dozens underway before Abu Ghraib was exposed, involved the following:

[A] doctor cleared a detainee for further interrogations, despite claims he had been beaten and shocked with a taser. The medic confirmed that the detainee’s injuries were consistent with his allegations, stating, "Everything he described he had on his body." Yet, the medic cleared him for further interrogation, giving him Tylenol for the pain. There is no indication that the medic reported this abuse.

Why would he, when abuse was policy? As at Gitmo, the medical professionals were brought into the abuse process, to determine how far prisoners could be tortured without dying. No, this is not Serbia or Saddam’s Iraq or Burma. This is the United States.