How Antonio Taguba, who investigated the Abu Ghraib scandal, became one of its casualties.
On the afternoon of May 6, 2004, Army Major General Antonio M. Taguba was summoned to meet, for the first time, with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in his Pentagon conference room. Rumsfeld and his senior staff were to testify the next day, in televised hearings before the Senate and the House Armed Services Committees, about abuses at Abu Ghraib prison, in Iraq. The previous week, revelations about Abu Ghraib, including photographs showing prisoners stripped, abused, and sexually humiliated, had appeared on CBS and in The New Yorker. In response, Administration officials had insisted that only a few low-ranking soldiers were involved and that America did not torture prisoners. They emphasized that the Army itself had uncovered the scandal.
If there was a redeeming aspect to the affair, it was in the thoroughness and the passion of the Army’s initial investigation. The inquiry had begun in January, and was led by General Taguba, who was stationed in Kuwait at the time. Taguba filed his report in March. In it he found: Numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses were inflicted on several detainees … systemic and illegal abuse.
…
"Here … comes … that famous General Taguba – of the Taguba report!" Rumsfeld declared, in a mocking voice. The meeting was attended by Paul Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld’s deputy; Stephen Cambone, the Under-Secretary of Defense for Intelligence; General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (J.C.S.); and General Peter Schoomaker, the Army chief of staff, along with Craddock and other officials. Taguba, describing the moment nearly three years later, said, sadly, "I thought they wanted to know. I assumed they wanted to know. I was ignorant of the setting."
I wrote the post about the ethos of the Bush Administration yesterday before I heard about or read Sumour Hersh’s article. The article is almost unreadable. Not Hersh – he’s a fine writer and investigator. It’s the content, the story of the systematic torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, the sexual humiliation, and the way the story was received and covered over by the Administration. This is not an article to summarize. It wouldn’t do it justice [on the other hand, it’s so hard to read that I’m afraid it will get lost in the shuffle]. But it speaks to the same point I was making yesterday – our government doesn’t care about people. The people that populate this Administration wear nice suits, and, at least when they were running for office, professed to be a religious lot. They throw around terms like "compassionate conservative," "faith based initiatives," and "family values" – but at the core, they are simply thugs. They started the war based on lies. They conducted the war like it was a Monopoly game. They ignored the basic human rights of our soldiers. And they treated the enemy in a shameful, bestial manner. They really should be prosecuted for war crimes, like Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic.
And as for General Taguba who investigated Abu Ghraib and gave this account to Seymour Hersh:
In January of 2006, Taguba received a telephone call from General Richard Cody, the Army’s Vice-Chief of Staff. “This is your Vice,” he told Taguba. “I need you to retire by January of 2007.” No pleasantries were exchanged, although the two generals had known each other for years, and, Taguba said, “He offered no reason.” …
“They always shoot the messenger,” Taguba told me. “To be accused of being overzealous and disloyal—that cuts deep into me. I was being ostracized for doing what I was asked to do.”
Taguba went on, “There was no doubt in my mind that this stuff”—the explicit images—“was gravitating upward. It was standard operating procedure to assume that this had to go higher. The President had to be aware of this.” He said that Rumsfeld, his senior aides, and the high-ranking generals and admirals who stood with him as he misrepresented what he knew about Abu Ghraib had failed the nation.
“From the moment a soldier enlists, we inculcate loyalty, duty, honor, integrity, and selfless service,” Taguba said. “And yet when we get to the senior-officer level we forget those values. I know that my peers in the Army will be mad at me for speaking out, but the fact is that we violated the laws of land warfare in Abu Ghraib. We violated the tenets of the Geneva Convention. We violated our own principles and we violated the core of our military values. The stress of combat is not an excuse, and I believe, even today, that those civilian and military leaders responsible should be held accountable.”
We recall Mi Lai as a black reminder of Viet Nam – a massacre of civilians by American soldiers. I think in the back of our minds, we let it pass as the result of "the fog of war." Abu Ghraib will be the lasting memory of the Iraq War. It wasn’t combat stress this time. It wasn’t a rogue unit out of control. It was something else. It was the kind of thing that happens when armed forces are lead by people who have no earthly idea about what the stakes are in a war; who have no idea why the word "honor" is associated with the military; who have no place in the leadership of soldiers; and who have no right to be in the American government as it was intended.
This administration punishes honorable people like General Shinsiki for saying we needed several hundred thousand soldiers for the Iraq war and General Taguba for uncovering the cruel and sordid details of Abu Ghraib. Then this Administration reward and honors their cronies that fail such as Tenet, Bremer, Wolfawitz( until he was fired by world bank). There are so many more names but who has the time.
You mention Mi Lai. If my memory serves me Seymour Hersh wrote the Mi Lai story and I think he won a Pulizer for it. Isn’t it strange that Mr. Hersh is still uncovering atrocities in another war over 40 years later?
I’d forgotten that Hersh reported Mi Lai [if I ever knew it].
Well. These pictures are authentic too. This is such an outrage!
I read a quote on one of my friend’s blogs today.
“Whatever you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it.â€
-Mahatma Gandhi
I think that whatever we do- write our senators, post blogs that outline the outrages coverups and lies of the Administration, protest are all insignificant, but added up they make a difference. We must make a difference. It’s too critical right now not to.
This article made me proud and it made me angry. I am so tired of good people being destroyed by this administrations insistence on following their ideology to the bitter end no matter what the cost. They are leaving a trail of destrucion in their wake and it’s disguisting and shameful.