Sen. Russ Feingold sent me a very nice letter in response to my email
against Gonzales along with a 3 page copy of Sen. Feingold's reasons
for voting against the architect of torture that was entered into the
Congressional Record.

Only Sen. Boxer stood up against the fraud in the US 2004
Presidential elections but since people have been emailing and
signing petitions - Congress.org is a good place to find some of the
best petitions including reasons against the Bush plan to destroy
Social Security, 36 out of a hundred Senators voted against the
Gonzales nomination. In the last vote, some Republicans are joining
Democrats in voting against Bush's draconian budget against middle
class Americans and the poor in favor of the super wealthy. Please
keep writing, calling and emailing your Congressperson. Please visit
Amnesty and Cageprisoners.com

A Boy Was Among Abu Ghraib Inmates, General Says
By MATT KELLEY, AP

WASHINGTON (March 11) - A boy no older than 11 was among the children
held by the Army at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison, the former U.S.
commander of the facility told a general investigating abuses at the
prison.

Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski did not say what happened to the boy or
why he was imprisoned, according to a transcript of her interview
with Maj. Gen. George Fay that was released by the American Civil
Liberties Union.

The transcript of the May 2004 interview was among hundreds of pages
of documents about Iraq prisoner abuses the group made public
Thursday after getting them under the Freedom of Information Act.

Karpinski, who was in charge of Abu Ghraib from July to November
2003, said she often visited the prison's youngest inmates. One
boy "looked like he was 8-years-old," Karpinski said.

"He told me he was almost 12," Karpinski said. "He told me his
brother was there with him, but he really wanted to see his mother,
could he please call his mother. He was crying."

Military officials have acknowledged that some juvenile prisoners had
been held at Abu Ghraib, a massive prison built by Saddam Hussein's
government outside Baghdad. But the transcript is the first
documented evidence of a child no older than 11 being held prisoner.

Military officials have said that no juvenile prisoners were subject
to the abuses captured in photographs from Abu Ghraib. But some of
the men shown being stripped naked and humiliated had been accused of
raping a 14-year-old prisoner.

The new documents offer rare details about the children whom the U.S.
military has held in Iraq. Karpinski said the Army began holding
women and children in a high-security cellblock at Abu Ghraib in the
summer of 2003 because the facility was better than lockups in
Baghdad where the youths had been held.

The documents include statements from six witnesses who said three
interrogators and a civilian interpreter at Abu Ghraib got drunk one
night and took a 17-year-old female prisoner from her cell. The four
men forced the girl to expose her breasts and kissed her, the reports
said. The witnesses - whose names were blacked out of the documents
given to the ACLU - said those responsible were not punished.

Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman has said three soldiers were
given "nonjudicial punishment" for making a female prisoner expose
her breasts. Nonjudicial punishments are sanctions short of a court-
martial, such as being fined or reduced in rank.

Another soldier said in January 2004 that troops poured water and
smeared mud on the detained 17-year-old son of an Iraqi general
and "broke" the general by letting him watch his son shiver in the
cold.

On another subject, Karpinski said she had seen written orders to
hold a prisoner that the CIA had captured without keeping records.
The documents released by the ACLU quote an unnamed Army officer at
Abu Ghraib as saying military intelligence officers and the CIA
worked out a written agreement on how to handle unreported detainees.
An Army report issued last September said investigators could not
find any copies of any such written agreement.

The Pentagon has acknowledged holding up to 100 "ghost detainees,"
keeping the prisoners off the books and away from humanitarian
investigators of the International Committee of the Red Cross.
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said he authorized it because
the prisoners were "enemy combatants" not entitled to prisoner of war
protections.

The ACLU has sued Rumsfeld on behalf of four Iraqis and four Afghans
who say they were tortured at U.S. military facilities. Rumsfeld and
his spokesmen have repeatedly said that the defense secretary and his
aides never authorized or condoned any abuses.

Six enlisted soldiers have pleaded guilty to military charges for
their roles in abuses at Abu Ghraib, and Pvt. Charles Graner Jr. was
convicted at a court-martial this year and sentenced to 10 years in
prison.

Karpinski, one of the few generals to be criticized in Army detainee
reports for poor leadership, quoted several senior generals in Iraq
as making callous statements about prisoners.

Karpinski said Maj. Gen. Walter Wodjakowski, then the No. 2 Army
general in Iraq, told her in the summer of 2003 not to release more
prisoners, even if they were innocent.

"I don't care if we're holding 15,000 innocent civilians. We're
winning the war," Karpinski said Wodjakowski told her. She said she
replied: "Not inside the wire, you're not, sir."


03-11-05 21:09 EST

Since last May, when news reports first emerged of the grim
conditions at Abu Ghraib, formerly Mr. Hussein's main torture center,
the military has opened new compounds at the prison that "are much
better situated for both the detainees and for custody and control,"
Colonel Johnson said.

Though this reporter arrived at Abu Ghraib on the military police
convoy from Tikrit, soldiers at the prison did not allow him to look
inside any of the compounds. The colonel later apologized and said he
would eventually arrange a tour.

The military is considering moving the detainees from Abu Ghraib to a
more secure location around Baghdad International Airport, the same
area where Camp Cropper is situated. The new center would hold about
2,500 people at most, though ideally the inmate population would stay
under 2,000, Colonel Johnson said.

Last summer, after the Abu Ghraib scandal became public, President
Bush promised to raze the prison, but a military judge later ordered
that it be preserved as a crime scene.

In the south, the Americans are working to expand Camp Bucca to
accommodate a total of 6,000 detainees by the end of March, officials
say.

It was an incident at Camp Bucca on Jan. 31 that most recently
exposed the potential hazards of the detainee system: Four detainees
were killed and six wounded when guards fired shots to quell a well-
organized uprising. The guards had replaced their nonlethal
weapons with lethal ones after realizing that detainees had armed
themselves with slingshots that could hurl stones for long distances.
Since then, the military has bought guns that fire "plasticized
projectiles" at a greater range, Colonel Johnson said.

punk like Scott Peterson became the monster that gobbled up a mother
lode of television

time in a wartime election year, their roads of inquiry will all lead
to Amber Frey.

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington
Feinstein, Joe Biden of Delaware, Charles Schumer of New York and
Russell Feingold

Please read The Normalization of Horror AMERICAN GULAGS BECOME
PERMANENT at http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article7675.htm


REPORT ON ABU GHRAIB WRITTEN BY MAJ. GEN. ANTONIO TAGUBA, STILL
MANY PORTIONS OF REPORT UNRELEASED.

On Capitol Hill, legislators on both sides of the aisle complain
testily that the Pentagon has turned into an informational black
hole. Some 2,000 out of 6,000 pages were missing from the copy of the
Taguba report delivered from the Pentagon to the Senate Armed
Services Committee.

Pentagon spokesman Larry DiRita last week called this merely
an "oversight." But among the missing pages were key documents,
including the final section of Taguba's lengthy questioning of Col.
Thomas Pappas, commander of the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade,
the unit that actually ran the interrogations in Abu Ghraib Block 1A
when the abuses occurred.

Sources say Pappas gave Taguba a detailed account of why he believed
that "policies and procedures" at Abu Ghraib "were enacted as a
specific result" of recommendations made by Maj. Gen. Geoffrey
Miller, the former commander at Guantanamo. Miller denies that he
exported to Iraq techniques used on Qaeda and Taliban
suspects at Gitmo. But Pappas even had some documents to buttress his
case, sources say, including one titled "Draft Update for the
Secretary of Defense."

Some senators say the Pentagon has so far obscured two issues: who
ordered Miller to Abu Ghraib in the first place, and who in the
Pentagon knew of the interrogation practices put in place there.
Steve Cambone, Rumsfeld's under secretary for intelligence, merely
said at a May 7 hearing of the Armed Services Committee that Miller
had gone to Iraq "at my encouragement." But neither Sanchez nor
centcom commander, Gen. John Abizaid, would tell a later hearing if
they knew of involvement by civilian higher-ups at the Pentagon.

As one committee member, Sen. Robert Byrd, told NEWSWEEK: "I was
stunned that the two top generals [in the Gulf] hemmed and hawed and
claimed they had no idea whether the secretary of Defense or the
civilian leadership of the Defense Department played any
role."

Miller himself has been accused of being less than forthright in a
classified briefing before Congress. In a May 21 letter to Miller,
Rep. Jane Harman chastised the general for "gaps and discrepancies in
your presentation" and for selectively withholding information in a
classified session the day before. Harman, the ranking minority
member on the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, added that
she now questions Miller's "candor." (A spokesman for Miller, Barry
Johnson, told NEWSWEEK that Miller "is drafting a response and
providing additional facts.")

But numerous critics—not just in the human-rights community, but in
Congress and the U.S. military as well—insist that the current probes
are still too limited to bring full accountability. Some critics say
Donald Rumsfeld's Defense Department is doing its best to stop
potentially incriminating information from coming out, that it's
deflecting Congress's inquiries and shielding higher-ups from
investigation.

Documents obtained by NEWSWEEK also suggest that Rumsfeld's aides are
trying hard to contain the scandal, even within the Pentagon. Defense
Under Secretary Douglas Feith, who is in charge of setting policy on
prisoners and detainees in occupied Iraq, has banned any discussion
of the still-classified report on Abu Ghraib written by Maj. Gen.
Antonio Taguba, which has circulated around the world.

Shortly after the Taguba report leaked in early May, Feith
subordinates sent an "urgent" e-mail around the Pentagon warning
officials not to read the report, even though it was on Fox News. In
the e-mail, a copy of which was obtained by NEWSWEEK, officials in
Feith's office warn that the leak is being investigated for "criminal
prosecution" and that no one should mention the Taguba report to
anybody, even to family members. Feith has turned his office into
a "ministry of fear," says one military lawyer. A spokesman for
Feith, Maj. Paul Swiergosz, says the e-mail warning was intended to
prevent employees from downloading a classified report onto
unclassified computers.

I just wanted to echo what Gen. Kimmitt emphasized on your show. We
are a value-based organization and those who participated in this
sick turn of events should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the
Uniform Code of Military Justice. They are a small minority that
do not represent what positive things that we do in Iraq. They did
not think of the consequences of what could happen to their fellow
soldiers if captured themselves. They blame this on the lack of
leadership and training. What about human morals? We are American
soldiers and believe in standards higher that what they displayed.
--SFC M. S.

The reservist charged with the atrocities at the Iraqi prison, who
works as a civilian prison guard, needs to be investigated for his
treatment of American prisons here at home.

It's obvious that he has no standards of decency and doesn't know the
appropriate ways to treat prisoners. After he serves his court
martial sentence, he should face the same charges that Saddam will
face for crimes against humanity.

Saying that he didn't have the Geneva Rules of Convention is no
excuse for the atrocities that he participated in. People have basic
human rights even if they are prisoners. Even though his family may
suffer, he knew the difference between right and wrong.
--C. W.

I can't believe that my uncle almost gave his life in Vietnam for
freedom, and now, we as a union are doing worse to those people of
Iraq. He tried to do his country right and now we, as people of the
free world, are harming people. Now we are doing it to another
country. I am alarmed and totally against this type of treatment. ...
Why are we treating our prisoners as if they lived with Hitler during
the Holocaust. I am totally aghast. We owe these people more respect
and admiration for their religion. ... We owe more to our fellow
mankind and our own statesmen. We are a country made of more than the
pilgrims.
--KW

The reason we invaded Iraq no longer has to do with weapons of mass
destruction or veiled suggestions from the White House that Iraq had
something to do with 9/11. No, we are now told that we invaded
because Saddam Perhaps the most horrific and false statement is the
fact that these individuals were "part-time" soldiers. I have been in
the military for 18 years, and 14 of those years have been as a "part-
time" soldier. The thing that makes me the most angry is the fact
that whether or not these "part-time" soldiers are only in the guard,
we all have been through the same basic training. Don't tell me that
part-time soldiers are not trained in Geneva Convention rules. That
is one of the main classes in basic training.

I can only compare the images that you showed of the Abu Ghraib
prison with images I have seen from concentration camps -- the
humiliation and dehumanization of the prisoners is absolute in both
cases. Have we, as Americans, demonized the Iraqis so much that we do
not see them as human? ... These images give the lie to
the "democracy" and "freedom" we keep preaching over and over. The
truth is that Iraqis are treated with the most obscene racism since
Jim Crow.

What the images further suggest is that not only is the Army not in
control of Iraq, as recent reports of insurgency indicate, but
moreover, they are not in control of the troops. I am further
dismayed that you knew about this story two weeks ago and repressed
it because of a Defense Department request, and seemed to have
published it because others would have before you did. You owe it to
the American people to tell us what is going on.

The press is the watchdog of democracy, but those days are obviously
not with us, just as he days when we could expect our army to conduct
itself according to the Geneva Convention.
--J. B.

Kudos go to the MPs who exposed this horror. Although in the Air
National Guard, after 9/11, I worked with some very fine Army
National Guard MPs, and the military police are the most dedicated
trained people. I blame the command for the actions that led to this
revolting behavior.
--TSGT W. N.

There is no excuse for this action. I don't care about the Geneva
Convention. We should treat any prisoners as we would want to have
been treated. It is called being humane. I don't want to hear any
excuses about "no guidelines." Anyone involved in this, including
the female commander, should be brought before a tribunal,
dishonorably discharged and stripped of all benefits. What a blot to
our country. I am so ashamed of us.
--S.

Although I was very disgusted and appalled by the actions of our
soldiers at the Baghdad prison in Iraq, I wasn't at all surprised.
For even in this country, in this day and age, the value of a human
life is still expendable when that life in not representative of the
majority. America has a long dark history of merciless behavior
towards the lives of its own, and the actions of these soldiers
documented in this broadcast only illustrates the old
adage that "the apple doesn't fall far from the tree."
--N. A.

Hussein was a brutal dictator who tortured and killed political
prisoners without trials. And what were our soldiers doing behind his
prison walls? Gen. Kimmitt took a hard and seemingly heartfelt stand
against the horrifying actions taken by a small number of
soldiers. But will it help in any way to mend our ever-more tattered
reputation on the world stage? What has happened to the United States
of America?
--E. F.

If these charges prove to be true, then the actions on which the
charges are based constitute war crimes committed on Iraqi soil.
Following their court martial, the guilty parties should be turned
over to Iraqi authorities. That would be justice.
--M. B. L.

As a U.S. Marine who served our nation for more than 24 years,
including multiple tours in Vietnam, I am appalled, ashamed and angry
about U.S. servicemen and women torturing Iraqi prisoners. I totally
reject any claim that those accused failed to receive adequate
training in the handling of POWs or the requirements of the Geneva
Convention. Such training would have only reinforced the rules of
common decency that should govern the behavior, one human being
toward another.

These soldiers, including their commanding officer, a brigadier
general, are disgrace to this nation. They, too, should stand before
the bar of justice at a war crimes tribunal. They are no better than
the evil regime which honorable Americans have fought and died to
oust.

--Master Gunnery Sgt. D. M. O.

By Seymor Hersh:

But in the middle of all of this, I get a call from a mother in the
East coast, Northeast, working class, lower middle class, very
religious, Catholic family. She said, I have to talk to you. I go see
her. I drive somewhere, fly somewhere, and her story is simply this.

She had a daughter that was in the military police unit that was at
Abu Ghraib. And the whole unit had come back in March, of - The
sequence is: they get there in the fall of 2003. Their reported after
doing their games in the January of 2004.

In March she is sent home. Nothing is public yet. The daughter is
sent home. The whole unit is sent home. She comes home a different
person. She had been married. She was young. She went into the
Reserves, I think it was the Army Reserves to get money, not for
college or for - you know, these - some of these people worked as
night clerks in pizza shops in West Virginia.

This not - this is not very sophisticated. She came back and she left
her husband. She just had been married before. She left her husband,
moved out of the house, moved out of the city, moved out to another
home, another apartment in another city and began working a
different job. And moved away from everybody. Then over - as the
spring went on, she would go every weekend, this daughter, and every
weekend she would go to a tattoo shop and get large black tattoos put
on her, over increasingly - over her body, the back, the arms, the
legs, and her mother was frantic. What's going on? Comes Abu Ghraib,
and she reads the stories, and she sees it. And she says to her
daughter, "Were you there?"

She goes to the apartment. The daughter slams the door. The mother
then goes - the daughter had come home - before she had gone to Iraq,
the mother had given her a portable computer. One of the computers
that had a DVD in it, with the idea being that when she was there,
she could watch movies, you know, while she was overseas, sort of
a - I hadn't thought about it, a great idea. Turns out a lot of
people do it. She had given her a portable computer, and when the kid
came back she had returned it, one of the things, and the mother then
said I went and looked at the computer.

She knows - she doesn't know about depression. She doesn't know about
Freud. She just said, I was just - I was just going to clean it up,
she said. I had decided to use it again. She wouldn't say anything
more why she went to look at it after Abu Ghraib. She opened it up,
and sure enough there was a file marked "Iraq".

She hit the button. Out came 100 photographs. They were photographs
that became - one of them was published. We published one, just one
in The New Yorker. It was about an Arab. This is something no mother
should see and daughter should see too. It was the Arab man leaning
against bars, the prisoner naked, two dogs, two shepherds, remember,
on each side of him. The New Yorker published it, a pretty large
photograph. What we didn't publish was the sequence showed the dogs
did bite the man - pretty hard. A lot of blood. So she saw that and
she called me, and away we go. There's another story.


In his confirmation hearing, for example, Gonzales had conceded, that
he and other senior Bush administration lawyers had engaged in
discussions about the boundaries of torture policy and even specific
torture techniques - such as feigned burials alive - that might be
used against captured terrorists.

But when asked for particulars, he lapsed into his standard
formulation: "I do not have a specific recollection about each
individual method of questioning [captured terror suspects]
discussed," Gonzales said in a written response to a question from
Sen. Edward Kennedy seeking any details at all about the meetings.
Nor, he said, could he find any notes or memos that he might have
taken at such meetings and which might have helped refresh his memory.

Gonzales's memory lapses - or, in the eyes of his critics,
evasions - extended beyond his time as White House counsel. Asked by
Sen. Patrick Leahy about his role in helping Texas Gov. George W.
Bush escape jury duty in a drunk-driving case in 1996 (and
therefore avoid having to answer questions that might have revealed
Bush's own conviction for driving under the influence of alcohol 20
years earlier) Gonzales recalled accompanying Bush to court and that
he "observed" the defense lawyer make a motion to strike Bush from
the jury.

A liberal-advocacy group, the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics
in Washington, this week filed a disciplinary complaint against
Gonzales with the State Bar of Texas, asking that the group
investigate the White House counsel for misrepresenting the jury-duty
matter in his written reply to Leahy. The White House insisted that
Gonzales's answer to Leahy was "accurate" and released a follow-up
letter Gonzales sent to Leahy on Tuesday, in response to the NEWSWEEK
article, in which he noted pointedly that the Vermont senator had
only asked him to describe the details of his "court appearance." As
translated by White House aides, whatever did or didn't happen in the
judge's chambers wasn't "in court" and therefore wasn't covered by
the scope of Leahy's question.)

Gonzales's oblique, lawyerly responses pushed a number of
Democrats - like Feinstein, Joe Biden of Delaware, Charles Schumer of
New York and Russell Feingold of Wisconsin - to switch sides at the
last minute. Four years ago, Feingold had been the only Democrat to
support John Ashcroft as attorney general; today he said he couldn't
vote the same way on Gonzales. Schumer today called his decision to
oppose Gonzales as "the most difficult vote I've had to make since
coming to the Senate." While he said he liked Gonzales and viewed him
as a "genuinely good man," Schumer said the White House counsel
seemed too compromised to place in charge of the Justice
Department. "It's hard to be a straight shooter when you're a blind
loyalist," Schumer said.

Still, senators said today there was little doubt that Gonzales will
be confirmed by the full Senate - although by a far narrower margin
than was anticipated when President Bush first nominated him for the
job two months ago.

And Republicans argue privately that the politics of the Gonzales
nomination is still solidly on their side. Not only will the
president's longtime consigliere become the first Hispanic attorney
general, the issue the Democrats and human-rights groups are bashing
him hardest over - the mistreatment and even alleged torture of
suspected terrorists - has shown no traction with the voters. "So
they're going to oppose the first Hispanic attorney general because
he's too mean to terrorists?" cracked one Senate GOP aide about the
Gonzales vote.

But today's vote was deeply disappointing to White House aides and
their Republican allies in the Senate. They desperately wanted
Gonzales to have a relatively smooth confirmation process that would
result in a strong bipartisan vote in the Senate. (Judiciary
Committee chairman Sen. Arlen Specter had hoped Gonzales would get as
many as 75 votes in his favor.) Were that to happen, the aides said
privately, it would help to dispel the polarizing atmosphere that has
pervaded the Justice Department ever since the divisive John Ashcroft
took over.

Today, Specter did not disguise his disappointment. "There is a very,
very thick aura of politics in the Washington atmosphere - heavier
than usual," he told reporters after today's vote. Whatever the
cause, it is an aura that is likely to linger - over Capitol Hill and
the Justice Department - for some time to come.

http://www.truthout.org/docs_05/printer_012805W.shtml