TORTURE AT ABU GHRAIB

By now, you've all heard the reports and seen the awful pictures of American and British guards horribly abusing Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib, Saddam's former torture chamber.
Phil Carter looks at the roles of private contractors and CIA operatives in the scandal.
Chris Allrbitton said that by stripping the prisoners, and making them perform homosexual acts, the American guards "must have had at least an instinctual knowledge of how awful their abuse would be. They picked a perfect storm of taboos and humiliation and documented it! that would enrage the Arab world."
But in Monday's New Yorker, Seymour Hersh, goes further, with the most potentially damning story of all.

As the international furor grew, senior military officers, and President Bush, insisted that the actions of a few did not reflect the conduct of the military as a whole. [An internal Army] report, however, amounts to an unsparing study of collective wrongdoing and the failure of Army leadership at the highest levels. The picture he draws of Abu Ghraib is one in which Army regulations and the Geneva conventions were routinely violated, and in which much of the day-to-day management of the prisoners was abdicated to Army military-intelligence units and civilian contract employees. Interrogating prisoners and getting intelligence, including by intimidation and torture, was the priority.