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).