Following up on Australian television’s broadcast of leaked Abu Ghraib photos, Salon has obtained thousands of documents from the Army’s investigation of the crimes committed there. It has posted a few previously unseen images. Based only on a description of the files and images, the deputy legal director for the Center for Constitutional Rights (which joined the ACLU in the FOIA lawsuit seeking the documents) said that it seemed to be a complete set. The lawsuit is now before an appeals court, but the Pentagon has agreed to "finish processing" all the documents by June 15.
As horrible as the images are, if this really is the complete set, they call into question Seymour Hersh’s description of their contents a year and a half ago. Salon has only posted a small portion of what it has, but I would certainly expect that if Hersh’s claims were backed up, they would at least mention it in the accompanying article.
It’s still not certain, however, that this is all of the documents.
In related developments:
Jalal Talabani called for "very harsh punishments against the perpetrators" of the Abu Ghraib crimes. Iraq’s human rights minister, Zuhair al-Chalabi, has asked the United States to turn over all of the 14,000 Iraqi prisoners it holds to the government of Iraq. At the same time, Iraq’s human rights minister, Nermine Othman, announced that that same Iraqi government tortured 170 Iraqis in a secret prison in Baghdad last year, and that she expected people in the interior and justice ministries to be prosecuted — not "high level officials" she was quick to add, demonstrating how quickly Iraqis are picking up cues from our president on accountability. (I’m still trying to figure out why Iraq has two different human rights ministers.) The Iraqi government is also investigating a case of Iraqi police acting as a death squad, with the help, Ms. Othman believes, of "lower level officials." She also expressed the opinion that it would have been better for the Abu Ghraib photographs to have been turned over to the Iraqis for investigation, rather than broadcast.
Given the request for the U.S. to turn over prisoners, I found this bleakly amusing:
Khalilzad has said the United States would "accelerate the investigation" to determine who was responsible for the abuses.
Not our abuses, mind you. Blaming the messenger works so well.
The U.N., however, is paying attention to some of those. It released the report the LA Times mentioned Monday which says that the treatment of prisoners at Guantánamo amounts to torture, that the facility should be shut down, and most importantly that "all special interrogation techniques authorized by the Department of Defense should immediately be revoked."
The idea that the United States is going to speed up the investigation of human rights crimes committed by Iraq’s Interior Ministry is a bitter joke. What Iraq needs is a full investigation of the crimes committed — one that doesn’t exclude high level officials before it even begins. The best thing we could do to encourage that would be to practice it.
