New Yorker: Abu Ghraib abuses were 'de facto US policy'

[kpete]

New Yorker: Abu Ghraib abuses were 'de facto US policy'
Nick Juliano
Published: Monday March 17, 2008

This week in the magazine, Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris write about Sabrina Harman, a U.S. Army specialist who took photographs at Abu Ghraib and was convicted by court-martial for her conduct there. Harman sat for nine hours of interviews with Morris for his movie “Standard Operating Procedure.” Here are excerpts from those interviews and a clip from the film, as well as video of Morris and Gourevitch from the 2007 New Yorker Festival, and photographs of Harman and of the abuses at Abu Ghraib.
http://www.newyorker.com/online/2008/03/24/abughraib

The low-ranking reservist soldiers who took and appeared in the infamous images were singled out for opprobrium and punishment; they were represented, in government reports, in the press, and before courts-martial, as rogues who acted out of depravity. Yet the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib was de facto United States policy. The authorization of torture and the decriminalization of cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment of captives in wartime have been among the defining legacies of the current Administration; and the rules of interrogation that produced the abuses documented on the M.I. block in the fall of 2003 were the direct expression of the hostility toward international law and military doctrine that was found in the White House, the Vice-President's office, and at the highest levels of the Justice and Defense Departments.T

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The photos, Harman said, were intended to "expose what was being allowed ... what the military was allowing to happen to other people."

One of the most iconic images from Abu Ghraib is actually among the most innocuous, Harman tells the magazine. It shows a hooded prisoner wearing a prison blanket with arms outstretched and attached to wires. The wires were not live, so there was no danger of electrocution for the prisoner, known as Gilligan to the soldiers guarding him.

Subsequent investigations revealed that Gilligan was not who the Army's Criminal Investigative Division thought he was -- he was simply an innocent cab driver. His interrogators appeared to have little regard for how he was treated before that information came to light, though, Gourevitch and Morris report.

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more at:
http://rawstory.com/news/2008/New_Yorker_Abu_Ghraib_abuses_were_0317.html