An uncomfortable backdrop to the Abu Ghraib story is the knowledge that various sorts of abuse are endemic throughout the American prison system. Along those lines, here's a clip from a piece in Saturday's Times by Fox Butterfield: "The experts also point out that the man who directed the reopening of the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq last year and trained the guards there resigned under pressure as director of the Utah Department of Corrections in 1997 after an inmate died while shackled to a restraining chair for 16 hours. The inmate, who suffered from schizophrenia, was kept naked the whole time. The Utah official, Lane McCotter, later became an executive of a private prison company, one of whose jails was under investigation by the Justice Department when he was sent to Iraq as part of a team of prison officials, judges, prosecutors and police chiefs picked by Attorney General John Ashcroft to rebuild the country's criminal justice system."

Meanwhile, on page 6 (link through then scroll down to page 6) of the latest edition of the Utah Sheriff's Association newsletter, The Utah Sheriff, is a picture of McCotter on "a tour of the death house at Abu Ghraib Prison" with Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz. The figure in the background appears to be Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski.

Department of Scoundrels looking for that last refuge. This from Kate O'Beirne ...

The most recent images of abuse concerning Iraqi detainees will inevitably fuel the anti-Americanism that endangers American lives — not at the hands of sadistic young misfits but at the hands of our elected representatives. Members of Congress elbowing their way into camera range to question, in the absence of any evidence whatsoever, whether abuses were widespread and senior commanders were implicated and accusing the military of engaging in some cover-up are abusing the Abu Ghraib scandal and recklessly putting our troops at risk.

Stab-in-the-back bake mix. Limited assembly required. Do-it-yourself. Off-the-Shelf.

In the context of these recent revelations, these couple-month-old claims from British nationals released from Guantanamo Bay appear in a new light.

This article in tomorrow's Guardian suggests that some of these sexual humiliation methods apparently practiced at Abu Ghraib are taught to various special <$NoAd$> forces and military intelligence troops in the US and the UK, both to use them and also to prepare themselves to withstand them.

What's now happening in Iraq is that the same methods are being passed down to untrained and unsupervised reservists; and the whole situation spirals out of control.

I'm not sure this is the whole story. But it has a ring of truth to me, mixing, as it does, ugliness with disorganization and a spiralling cycle of unaccountability.

The sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison was not an invention of maverick guards, but part of a system of ill-treatment and degradation used by special forces soldiers that is now being disseminated among ordinary troops and contractors who do not know what they are doing, according to British military sources.

The techniques devised in the system, called R2I - resistance to interrogation - match the crude exploitation and abuse of prisoners at the Abu Ghraib jail in Baghdad.

One former British special forces officer who returned last week from Iraq, said: "It was clear from discussions with US private contractors in Iraq that the prison guards were using R2I techniques, but they didn't know what they were doing."

He said British and US military intelligence soldiers were trained in these techniques, which were taught at the joint services interrogation centre in Ashford, Kent, now transferred to the former US base at Chicksands

...

Many British and US special forces soldiers learn about the degradation techniques because they are subjected to them to help them resist if captured. They include soldiers from the SAS, SBS, most air pilots, paratroopers and members of pathfinder platoons

...

"The crucial difference from Iraq is that frontline soldiers who are made to experience R2I techniques themselves develop empathy. They realise the suffering they are causing. But people who haven't undergone this don't realise what they are doing to people. It's a shambles in Iraq".

The British former officer said the dissemination of R2I techniques inside Iraq was all the more dangerous because of the general mood among American troops.

"The feeling among US soldiers I've spoken to in the last week is also that 'the gloves are off'. Many of them still think they are dealing with people responsible for 9/11".

Not an excuse, certainly, but here I think we can start to see the contours of the perfect storm -- hideous methods, at least reserved for restricted cases, parcelled out to unsupervised amateurs, abetted by what might be generously termed high-level indifference. Marathon Man? Lord of the Flies?

If there's a pattern here -- and I'm not sure we know <$NoAd$>enough yet to discern patterns -- it's one of military intelligence officers giving untrained and unsupervised soldiers vague instructions to 'soften up' prisoners to get them to talk in subsequent investigations.

That's a recipe for ugly results.

Here's a snippet from a new story from ABC News ...

The photographs show a 52-year-old former Baath Party official, Nadem Sadoon Hatab, who died at the detention center last June after a three-day period in which he was allegedly subjected to beatings and karate kicks to the chest and left to die naked in his own feces.

Abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Camp White Horse was allegedly carried out by U.S. Marine reservists. The accused reservists have told their lawyers they were given orders to "soften up" the men in their custody for interrogation by what were known as human exploitation teams from military intelligence.

...

According to testimony in the case, Hatab was targeted for especially harsh treatment because he was believed to be in possession of Jessica Lynch's 507th Army Battalion weapon and suspected of involvement in the ambush of her unit.

In this case, thankfully, a criminal prosecution is apparently well underway.

Among the more buck-passing and diversionery arguments proffered to explain what's emerged from Abu Ghraib is this truly far-fetched column by Linda Chavez, which seeks to lay the blame on having women in the ranks of the American military.

Now, you do have to sort of center yourself for a moment to be able to take such ridiculousness seriously. But here goes ...

Chavez's argument is that having women in integrated units is bad for good order and discipline. But more specifically she argues that "putting young men and women at their sexual prime in close proximity to each other 24 hours a day increases sexual tension [and that] military service has become heavily sexualized, with opportunities for male and female soldiers, sailors and Marines to engage in sexual fraternization, which, though frowned upon -- and in certain circumstances, forbidden -- is almost impossible to prevent."

Now, I don't think it makes much sense to draw any social policy lessons from this -- not about women in the military, gays in the military or anything else. The real issue is some ugly mix of poor oversight, abetting policy and the darker, more malleable side of human nature. Let's also note that the issue is not the nature of the sexual dimension of this, but the fact that it is coerced and punitive.

Yet who can ignore that the subtext of all this is homoerotic? And just how does having women in the armed forces contribute to this? If you're going to draw a social policy lesson from this, I'd say Chavez's is hardly the most logical. More plausible, though not the most probable explanation, would be the homophobia that is unfortunately quite entrenched in the US military and indeed throughout much of American society. Let's be frank, if there's an issue of 'sexual tension' involved when men try to humiliate other men by calling them 'fags' and forcing them to simulate homosexual acts, I'd say it's an issue of sexual tension between men, rather than between men and women.

A bunch of readers have asked me what it was Sen. Joe Lieberman said this morning that made me react so negatively. It was his words right out of the gate this morning at the Senate hearings ...

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. Secretary, the behavior by Americans at the prison in Iraq is, as we all acknowledge, immoral, intolerable and un-American. It deserves the apology that you have given today and that have been given by others in high positions in our government and our military.

I cannot help but say, however, that those who were responsible for killing 3,000 Americans on September 11th, 2001, never apologized. Those who have killed hundreds of Americans in uniform in Iraq working to liberate Iraq and protect our security have never apologized.

And those who murdered and burned and humiliated four Americans in Fallujah a while ago never received an apology from anybody.

So it's part of -- wrongs occurred here, by the people in those pictures and perhaps by people up the chain of command.

But Americans are different. That's why we're outraged by this. That's why the apologies were due.

Ugly, pandering, a display of the cheapest tendencies <$Ad$>of the man.

Our moral superiority to mass murderers and people who desecrate people's bodies in town squares is, while thankfully true, simply not relevant to this issue.

This is the sort of subject-changing our parents try to wean us from when we're in grade school. (Okay, I did that. But look what Tommy did!) And of course there's the side-issue that Lieberman is playing to the notion that there's some sort of 'they did this to us and now we did this to them' issue here. And (how many times does it have to be said?) these folks in Abu Ghraib weren't the 9/11 planners.

Nothing Lieberman said is untrue precisely. It does set us apart from fascists and mass-murderers that Americans are outraged by this and that there will be investigations and accountability. But talk about defining deviance down!

In cases like this, emphasis is everything. And his was all wrong.

For Mr. Responsibility and Morality, what a disappointment.

He can take a lesson not only from John McCain but from Lindsey Graham too.

I've only seen portions of today's testimony. From what I've seen the Pentagon needs new civilian management. But then we knew that. Or at least that's long been my judgment. Yet take note of this snap poll from ABC which says that very few Americans seem to think Rumsfeld's head should roll over this.

Secondly, I've always had a love/hate feeling (I'd say love/hate relationship but obviously he has no idea who I am) about Joe Lieberman. After his statement today, no love.

You know things haven't reached anything near the equilibrium phase for Don Rumsfeld when you see something like this. Yesterday afternoon or evening -- I don't remember precisely when -- the headline on MSNBC was something to the effect of 'Rumsfeld to go on offensive'.

I remember reading that and thinking, offensive against who? Who's he going to attack?

This morning the headlines everywhere read 'Rumsfeld to apologize.' So the ground is moving under their feet. All the normal signs point to Rumsfeld being history. But I still can't get myself to think that this White House, at this political moment, will kick him overboard.

On a lighter note, this might be an apt time to review that classic book of maxims Rumsfeld's Rules -- here in .pdf and here in html.

Some points now make for interesting reading ...

In the execution of presidential decisions work to be true to his views, in fact and tone.

If you foul up, tell the president and correct it fast. Delay only compounds mistakes.

Stay tuned ...

A letter to the editor of Stars and Stripes, from an MP serving in Baghdad. Worth reading.

From an article in the Post: "Some U.S. officials said Rumsfeld was resistant to repeated warnings from Iraq governor L. Paul Bremer -- delivered as early as last fall -- that the United States was detaining too many Iraqis for too long and in poor conditions. Bremer told Rumsfeld and other senior administration officials that if the problem persisted, the political fallout in Iraq would be serious, the officials said."

And following up on Thursday's post about the prohibitive political costs of canning Rumsfeld, this from the same article in the Post: "A White House official said that it is the view of a number of people close to Bush that getting rid of Rumsfeld would be 'a self-inflicted political and policy wound disproportionate to the secretary's responsibility for this human failure on the part of a small number of soldiers.'"

Finally, the same Post article suggests something I'd heard from a source on Wednesday: that the Miller report from last October -- the one that seemed to recommend more Gitmo-style rules for interrogations and imprisonment in Iraq -- was itself ordered because of reports of problems with the detention of prisoners in the country. As for myself, I still have some question whether Miller was sent out there -- remember he went in August and September -- because the insurgency was heating up at the time and it was felt that ... well, more needed to be done.

Here's an idea or something possibly to consider (and I have to thank a reader --JS -- for reminding me of this connection).

In many of the articles on this emerging Iraqi prisoners story, it has been claimed that some of the key instigators or enablers of bad acts were military intelligence officers.

Now, who's the head of military intelligence? 'Head' is too vague. There's no such post per se. But what comes pretty close is the Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence.

And who's that? Lt. Gen. William G. "Jerry" Boykin.

Remember him? He's the one who got in trouble last year for describing his battle with a Muslim Somali warlord by saying "I knew that my God was bigger than his God. I knew that my God was a real God and his was an idol", saying President Bush was chosen by God, and generally that the war on terror is an apocalyptic struggle between Christianity and Satan.

Last fall, after Boykin's efforts to channel Charlemagne or perhaps Urban II became known, he asked Don Rumsfeld to initiate an 'investigation' into whether his comments "violated any Pentagon rules or procedures" whatever that might mean. Just this week it was reported that the 'investigation' still continues; and Boykin has not been disciplined in any way.

In any case, I doubt very much that all this mess we've gotten ourselves into is attributable to this one man. But at what point in this scandal does someone ask whether some of this might have some connection to the fact that the guy running military intelligence believes the war on terror is a literal holy war pitting Christian America against Satan and his Muslim minions?

And then there's another possibility, perhaps distinct, perhaps overlapping.

An article in the Guardian -- this piece is truly gripping, a must-read -- there is an interview with a military intelligence officer who served at Guantanamo and then later served at Abu Ghraib as a contractor for CACI.

The upshot of the piece is that the place is so mismanaged and there's so much pressure for contractors to produce people to fill slots as interrogators that they end up sending people with no experience whatsoever. "If you're in such a hurry to get bodies," he says, "you end up with cooks and truck drivers doing intelligence work."

The intelligence officer, who was involved in processing people at Guantanamo, thinks that more than a third of the people in custody there had no ties to terrorism at all.

And then there are passages like this that are at once entirely predictable and yet leave you wondering what things have come to ...

"A unit goes out on a raid and they have a target and the target is not available; they just grab anybody because that was their job," Mr Nelson said, referring to counter-insurgency operations in Iraq. "The troops are under a lot of stress and they don't know one guy from the next. They're not cultural experts. All they want is to count down the days and hopefully go home.

"I've read reports from capturing units where the capturing unit wrote, 'the target was not at home. The neighbour came out to see what was going on and we grabbed him'," he said.

According to Mr Nelson's account, the victims' very innocence made them more likely to be abused, because the interrogators refused to believe they could have been picked up on such arbitrary grounds. Interrogators "weren't interested in going through the less glamorous work of sifting through the chaff to get to the kernels of truth from the willing detainees; they were interested in 'breaking' tough targets", he said

Then there's the matter, reported some time ago, that one contractor working in Iraq was employing Apartheid-era paramilitaries, some of whom had had to seek amnesty from the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission for war crimes, terrorism and murders they'd committed under the old regime.

It gets deeper and darker.

From a late article out from USA Today: "Shortly before Bush administration officials presented Republican congressional leaders with a request for $25 billion in Iraq funding this week, Secretary of State Colin Powell was telling members of the Congressional Black Caucus that no such request would be forthcoming ... Powell's associates tried to downplay the mix-up. But it underscores the continuing rift between President Bush's departments of State and Defense and deepens the impression that the nation's top diplomat is being cut out of the decision-making process."

Can the president apologize for humiliating this guy too? Even apologizing to Abdullah would be a start.

I see no point dragging out this presidential apology business any more. The president did what he was willing to do after the politicals told him the first try wasn't enough. Everyone's drawn their conclusions, and so forth. But what precisely was the idea in apologizing to Abdullah and then going out and announcing that he'd apologized to Abdullah?

Abdullah's an Arab. And he's from nextdoor to Iraq. And he was in town. Actually he was at my house. So I figured I'd apologize to him. How's that? Did I mentioned that I apologized to Abdullah?

And how about Rush Limbaugh's idea of a fun night out and blowing off steam?

You know when you're worked to the bone and you really need to unwind there's just nothing like grabbing a half dozen Arab dudes, stripping them naked, tying their bodies together against their will and pressing one guy's penis up against another guy's butt to make it like they're having anal sex. Right?

Party time for Rush, it would seem, is a mix of Studio 54 and Jack the Ripper.

As fun as A Clockwork Orange.

It's the Abner Louimafication of regime change.

An interesting tidbit from this evening's <$NoAd$>edition of The (must-read) Nelson Report ...

We can contribute a second hand anecdote to newspaper stories on rising concern, last year, from Secretary of State Powell and Deputy Secretary Armitage about Administration attitudes and the risks they might entail: according to eye witnesses to debate at the highest levels of the Administration...the highest levels...whenever Powell or Armitage sought to question prisoner treatment issues, they were forced to endure what our source characterizes as "around the table, coarse, vulgar, frat-boy bully remarks about what these tough guys would do if THEY ever got their hands on prisoners...."

-- let's be clear: our source is not alleging "orders" from the White House. Our source is pointing out that, as we said in the Summary, a fish rots from its head. The atmosphere created by Rumsfeld's controversial decisions was apparently aided and abetted by his colleagues in their callous disregard for the implications of the then-developing situation, and by their ridicule of the only combat veterans at the top of this Administration.

Tough guys ...

There's a rush of new articles out this afternoon which, at first blush, make me think Don Rumsfeld is finished.

An article in Reuters has a Republican senate staffer saying this about what Rumsfeld needs to do to keep his job ...

A Senate Republican aide said Rumsfeld must "give the performance of his life," and show contrition.

"He needs to have full disclosure of the facts, no parsing of words or displaying the usual convoluted testimony that the Senate Armed Services Committee has been accustomed to," the Republican aide said.

As far as people losing their jobs goes, political storms have two phases: a dynamic phase and an equilibrium phase. The first comes right after the revelation when everything is influx and the person <$Ad$>on the line is wholly embattled. Usually, and always if the person in question is to survive, you then reach a point of equilibrium where the person's defenders find some point, some firm ground, on which they feel they can defend him.

If that second stage doesn't kick in quickly the person is almost always finished. In virtually every case, what does someone in is not an abundance of critics but a lack of defenders.

One thing that makes Rumsfeld more vulnerable is that he's already lost what was once a key pillar of support: hawks and neocons. Just recently, Bill Kristol and Bob Kagan wrote a piece in the Weekly Standard that all but called on Bush to fire Rumsfeld.

For all these reasons it's difficult for me to see where Rumsfeld's equilibrium comes from. Yet there's an added political question.

Let's say Rumsfeld resigns on Friday. The election is still six months away. And the nation is at war. So a new Defense Secretary would be needed more or less immediately. That would open up a very uncomfortable prospect for the administration.

Confirmation hearings for a new Sec Def would, I think, inevitably turn into a national forum for discussing the management of the Pentagon, the planning for the war and the lack of planning for the occupation. The new nominee would be drawn into all sorts of uncomfortble public second-guessing of what's happened up until this point. Sure, that's stuff under Rumsfeld. But, really, it's stuff under Bush -- the civilian head of the United States military.

That, I have to imagine, is something the White House would like to avoid at any cost.

Le Monde has posted some hand-written letters <$NoAd$>home from Sergeant Ivan L. "Chip" Frederick II. Frederick is one the soldiers at the heart of the prison scandal in Iraq. And these letters were in the form of accounts of behavior he was both participating in but also morally troubled by.

I've just skimmed through so far. But this section, which I've transcribed to the best of my ability, is one that jumped out at me ...

Back around Nov[ember] an OGA prisoner was brought to IA. They stressed him out so bad that the man passed away. They put his body in a body bag and packed him in ice for approximately 24 hours in the shower in 1B. The next day the medics came in and put his body on a stretcher, placed a fake I.V. in his arm and took him away. This OGA was never processed and therefore never had a number.

That's on page 10 of the .pdf document on the Le Monde website. It's also noted in Hersh's piece in The New Yorker.

Lettin' off a little steam ...

Rush <$NoAd$>Limbaugh from yesterday ...

This is no different than what happens at the Skull and Bones initiation and we're going to ruin people's lives over it and we're going to hamper our military effort, and then we are going to really hammer them because they had a good time. You know, these people are being fired at every day. I'm talking about people having a good time, these people, you ever heard of emotional release? You of heard of need to blow some steam off?

Another example of how a war for liberal democracy can't be run by the most illiberal people in our society.

And just what is Rush's idea of a 'good time'?

Now Marc Zell (yesterday quoted at length in Salon trashing Ahmed Chalabi) denies everything.

In his letter Zell says, "I have never met with Mr. Ahmed Chalabi nor have I ever held any discussions with him. I have no personal knowledge of his past or present dealings, other than what I myself read in the international and national press."

It seems a little hard to figure that he knows so little since he's in business with Chalabi's nephew. But read the exchange and make up your own mind.