His and Hersh: How Bush And Rumsfeld Created The Horror of Abu Ghraib, Then Protected Themselves

I posted this at All Things Democrat in the wee hours of this morning, but it needs as much attention as possible (remember how Rummy dismissed abuses in Iraq prisons as the work of "a few bad apples" - I can agree with this if you say those bad apples are named Georgie Porgy and Donny Dumbsfeld):

While perhaps too many Americans have been closely following interviews with England’s two princes (Harry and William) and the unanswered questions of what happened on the night of their mother’s - Princess Diana’s - death a decade ago, there’s a much bigger issue that needs attention: what Bush and Rumsfeld allowed happen at the Iraq prison Abu Ghraib (and elsewhere).

Hardhitting journalist Seymour Hersh, one of the first to break the stories of abuse of prisoners - many of whom were arrested only for being Iraqis or Muslim or simply looking different from Americans - by American soldiers in 2004, is back in The New Yorker with fresh details that tell us both President Bush and then Pentagon Secretary Donald Rumsfeld LIED LIED LIED about not knowing of the torture and degradation and unnecessary deaths while they worked tirelessly to keep any official investigation into it from looking beyond grunt soldiers and low ranking generals.

Much of the punch packed in Hersh’s latest piece comes from Major General Antonio M. Taguba, the man charged with investigating the abuses at Abu Ghraib when the Bush Administration and Pentagon could no longer look blankly and say, “What’s Abu Ghraib?” Taguba says that Bush and Rummy knew WAY before they say they did about the claims of massive abuses, tortures and even deaths at the prison, that they specifically BLOCKED Taguba from looking any higher up the food chain than lowly GIs and minor generals, and THEN forced Taguba to retire as punishment for trying to investigate as fully and fairly as a decent inquiry should.

The highest “hit” there, of course, was Janis Karpinski, a one star general then titularly in charge of Abu Ghraib but - she says - forced by the Pentagon to allow psy ops and torture proponents run the prison and then busted down when she did as ordered by Rummy; the rest were the likes of Lindy England (the Abu Ghraib poster girl for torture and leash holding as well as frequent model for sex pictures in and around prisoners).

Too Fat To Be Executed? 10 Tries to Kill A Man And You Blame It On The Convict?

This, from one of only five countries in the entire world to apply the death penalty to those less than the age at which they can enter into a legal contract (as in children less than age 18-21, often called "kids" as in "immature" and "not fully cooked"):

LUCASVILLE, Ohio (AP) -- Death penalty opponents called on the state to halt executions after prison staff struggled to find suitable veins on a condemned man's arm to deliver the lethal chemicals.

The execution team stuck Christopher Newton at least 10 times with needles Thursday to insert the shunts where the chemicals are injected.

He died at 11:53 a.m., nearly two hours after the scheduled start of his execution at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility. The process typically takes about 20 minutes.

"What is clear from today's botched execution is that the state doesn't know how to execute people without torturing them to death," American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio attorney Carrie Davis said Thursday.

The Mentally Ill: "A Little Torture in Michigan"

Monkeyfister points us to this terrible - and sadly, less and less unusual - story of a man with manic depression who very quickly deteriorated and died in prison custody, presented by CBS. Solitary confinement and restraints can "break" a healthy person in a very short period of time. Yet throughout America as well as in America's "secret" prisons and Guantanamo Bay/Gitmo, often with people charged with no crime whatsoever or as in this case, a mere shoplifting charge, law enforcement and military and quasi military organizations use these techniques that result in unbelievable suffering, permanent mental illness, and, with growing frequency, death.

You wouldn't imagine these days that a mental patient could be chained to a concrete slab by prison guards until he died of thirst, but that’s how Timothy Souders died and he is not the only one.

Souders suffered from manic depression. And like a lot of mental patients in this country, he got into trouble and ended up not in a hospital, but in jail. It was a shoplifting case and he paid with his life.

As correspondent Scott Pelley reports, no one would have been the wiser, but a medical investigator working for a federal judge caught wind of Souders' death and discovered his torturous end was recorded on videotape. The tapes, which are hard to watch, open a horrifying window on mental illness behind bars.

Six months ago, Tim Souders was in solitary at the Southern Michigan Correctional Center. He was 21, serving three to five years. Though an investigation would show he needed urgent psychiatric care, Souders was chained down, hands, feet and waist, up to 17 hours at a time. By prison rules, all of it was recorded on a 24-hour surveillance camera and by the guards themselves.

The tape records a rapid descent: he started apparently healthy, but in four days Souders could barely walk. In the shower, he fell over. The guards brought him back in a wheelchair, but then chained him down again. On Aug. 6th, he was released from restraints and fell for the last time. Souders had died of dehydration and only the surveillance camera took notice.

Thanks, too, to Scott Pelley and CBS News/60 Minutes for presenting a story that would otherwise have gone unnoticed by all but those who loved this young man.