Iraq prison abuse commission delivers report

It's like "Breaker Morant," eh?

Give it time and we'll see whether it's more like Paths to Glory.

"Mr Schlesinger added, in answer to a question, that Mr Rumsfeld's resignation would be 'a boon to all of America's enemies' and would be a 'misfortune if it were to take place...'"

Comments like this as well as the commission member selection and the brevity of the investigation are not going to fly in the Arab world.... Al Jazeera will point all this out and I think the whole thing will prove to be a bigger liability for the administration than if they had done nothing at all.

Meanwhile, another separate report is due next week:

Twenty-seven military intelligence personnel were involved in abusing Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib jail, a new US army report has found.

Investigators found senior commanders at the jail knew about the abuses but failed to act.

The report comes a day after another panel faulted Pentagon leaders over the abuse, but mainly blamed soldiers and their superiors at the prison.

Seven soldiers have been charged in the abuse scandal.

The new Fay report, which takes its name from one of the investigation team Gen George Fay, focused on the role of a military intelligence unit at the prison.

"We discovered serious misconduct and a loss of moral values," Gen Paul Kern, who led the inquiry, told reporters.

He said the probe "revealed disturbing facts" about the behaviour of "a small number of soldiers" who served in Abu Ghraib prison, west of Baghdad.

Four of the 27 incriminated personnel were civilian contractors working as interrogators, Gen Kern said.

He said another eight, including two civilians, were aware of the abuse but failed to report it.

Gen Fay said the investigation had found "a few instances where torture was being used".

James Shlesinger, Director of the CIA (DCI) under Richard Nixon from February 2, 1973 until July 2, 1973 investigates Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse and concludes that the torture had nothing whatever to do with interrogation by intelligence agents or US policy, but rather must be attributed to a lack of adequate supervision on the night shift, sadky allowing a bunch of sadists to run wild (which has been the cover story for this operation since day one)... SHOCKAH!

I don't understand the point of reports like this if they don't have any power to compel anyone to do anything any differently.

Yeah, I guess. But I do think strictly advisory commissions can be powerful - if this had really screwed Rumsfeld, popular sentiment might have forced him to resign, and perhaps endanger Bush's administration. Of course, if these things are going to do anything, the people running them need to have some guts.

I don't give a fuck who Bush's SecDef is, I know he'll be bad. I mean the power, like actual power to compel a satisfactory redesign of military guidelines and oversight for POW treatment.

Or even the articulation of what exactly the United States obligations under the Geneva Conventions are, both to conventional POWs and "enemy combatants"

WHY THE FUCK IS NO ONE CARING ABOUT THIS, IT WAS ON THE FRONT PAGE EVERY DAY FOR A MONTH.

The US blatantly doesn't give a shit about the Geneva Convention so articulating their obligations would be a waste of time, it seems.

it would probably be crass, but I think Kerry should talk more about this.