http://www.conjur.com/blog/2005/03/04/an-audience-with-seymour-hersh/he Iraqi resistance has the government wired. They have people in various key areas of the government. Hersh made a point of emphasizing that. In the meantime, American intelligence about the resistance remains at about the same level as it did eighteen months ago, scattered and incomplete. This lack of intelligence is what led to wholesale roundups of suspected members of the resistance (for a prime example of how house-to-house searches were conducted, see the Extra Features on the Fahrenheit 9/11 DVD. Specifically, the interview with the Swedish journalist who went along with American troops on house-to-house searches in Samarra.) Most of the detainees were kept in Abu Ghraib. Abu Ghraib has a notorious reputation amongst Iraqis. It is the site of the most heinous acts against prisoners by Saddam Hussein and his supporters during his reign. The Americans at Abu Ghraib, however, took things even further. Aside from the heinous actions involving beatings, using dogs trained to bite the groin areas, and even outright murder, one aspect that has raised the ire amongst Iraqis, Muslims, and others around the world, is the sexual abuse levied against the prisoners. Hersh prefaced this segment of his speech by stating that those involved in the actual application of abuse and torture in Abu Ghraib were not just acting out of ignorance or out of being victims of circumstance (understaffing an over-crowded prison.) On the contrary, the specific actions taken had to only be at the behest of people in charge of the intelligence gathering in Iraq. This goes all the way to the White House.
Hersh went into a bit of detail in the drafting of the so-called Torture Memo by Jay Bybee approved by now-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and consulted by now-Secretary of Homeland Security, Michael Chertoff. This Torture Memo was written with one goal in mind, creating a narrowly defined term of torture that would allow the Bush administration a great amount of latitude in its techniques for obtaining information. This all began with abuse and torture of prisoners in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Some of the detainees at Guantanamo were elderly men, as old as being in their 80s, who were in no way a part of Al Qaeda or the Taliban in Afghanistan. When these innocent people were finally released, some released more than two years after being captured, Hersh opined, if they were not enemies of America before, they were now. U.S. techniques were creating more enemies and were resulting in useless information as detainees were confessing to anything in order to stop the torture and abuse.
At Abu Ghraib, the Bush administration orchestrated policies that were focused on humiliating detainees through sexual means. In the Muslim world, sex is an incredibly taboo subject. Men are not allowed to touch women in certain situations, being seen naked or forced to perform certain sexual acts brings shame upon a family that, in Muslim society, is a sentence worse than death. This was surely known by members of the Bush administration that recruited people to setup and train officers and interrogators at the prisons. We now know that five key men all had severe human rights abuses in their past careers in running prisons here in America. This was surely known by Ashcroft, despite the statements otherwise by the DOJ Inspector General. Hersh was also made aware of first-hand stories from former detainees of Abu Ghraib. He found that some woman at Abu Ghraib were so ashamed of the sexual abuse to which they were submitted that they sent messages to their family and friends to kill them when they came to visit them in the prison or when they were released. They were so ashamed of what was done to them or what they saw that they preferred to be killed than to live with the shame. Other prisoners were intimidated by the taking of photos of them in various sexual positions. These photos were used as carrots to get the prisoners to join the resistance report back to the officers with intelligence on the resistance. Failure to do so meant that the photos would be disseminated around their village and they would forever be shamed. The actual group in charge of Abu Ghraib was previously involved in traffic control and could not have known of the extreme taboo surrounding Muslims and sexual abuses. These orders had to have come from above.
The abuses at Abu Ghraib are also leaving an indelible mark in the psyche of the “worker-bee” soldiers ordered to take the photos and carry out some of the abuses. An example is the case of a female soldier who returned to the States, Indiana, specifically, from Iraq. Her mother noticed a marked change in her daughter’s attitude. The soldier’s condition worsened and wouldn’t even talk or meet with her mother. The mother, however, did come across a CD during a visit to her daughter’s home. On that CD was a folder named “Iraq” and it contained many photos of the abuses that occurred in Abu Ghraib. As a reaction to the stress, this female soldier had been consistently going to a tattoo parlor and had been having her body covered in black tattoos.
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