how Pinoy general who investigated Abu Ghraib got shafted

[raacluse]

I didn't pay a whole lotta attention when General Taguba reported on Abu Ghraib. I'd thought it was a whitewash.

Apparently not. The report suggested the problem extended higher up the chain of command.

Seymour Hersh's article covers some background on developments in secret operations, interrogations, and the like.

He tries to trace who knew what when about the situation at Abu Ghraib.

Also profiles Taguba and relates his views on how he got screwed over by higher-ups in the Army and Pentagon after the report came out.

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/06/17/1937/

[SunWuKong]

i'm not surprised.

[power puff girl]

I didn't pay a whole lotta attention when General Taguba reported on Abu Ghraib. I'd thought it was a whitewash.

Apparently not. The report suggested the problem extended higher up the chain of command.

Seymour Hersh's article covers some background on developments in secret operations, interrogations, and the like.

He tries to trace who knew what when about the situation at Abu Ghraib.

Also profiles Taguba and relates his views on how he got screwed over by higher-ups in the Army and Pentagon after the report came out.

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/06/17/1937/

it goes all the way to the top. rummy the dummy authorized the tactic of raping iraqi children in jail to humilate their parents into co-operating.

http://www.armchairsubversive.org/

[Golden Monkey]

it goes all the way to the top. rummy the dummy authorized the tactic of raping iraqi children in jail to humilate their parents into co-operating.

http://www.armchairsubversive.org/

Do you ever stop hating?

[raacluse]

It's interesting to contrast all this hate for the Rumsfeld, when during the first couple years he was showered with love.

But getting back to Taguba...
I found this passage from Hersh's article noteworthy:

“I’ll talk to you about discrimination,” he said one morning, while discussing, without bitterness, his early years as an Army officer. “Let’s talk about being refused to be served at a restaurant in public. Let’s talk about having to do things two times, and being accused of not speaking English well, and having to pay myself for my three master’s degrees because the Army didn’t think I was smart enough. So what? Just work your ass off. So what? The hard work paid off.”

=- =- =- =- =-

That may be, but... Although he had attained a high rank, once he was tapped to investigate Abu Ghraib, it seems he needed lots more political savvy to deal with the fall out from the report and the reaction from Pentagon politicos.

It makes you wonder if Taguba was set up from the start. Probably not, but Abu Ghraib would not be a popular topic at the Pentagon, so anything suggesting Pentagon knowledge or discrete approval of stuff going on at Abu Ghraib would be vulnerable to retaliation.

[raacluse]

I caught the last 10 minutes of Taguba's talk at San Francisco's Commonwealth club on Monday, 25 June. It was rebroadcast on CSPAN radio last night.

The final question posed to him was something like "when did he know that his career was finished?"

He said that when he got transfered to the Pentagon after testifying on Capitol Hill, some Senator or staffer called him to ask if his new job was in retaliation to his testimony.

He told the caller that it was a lateral, and not a demotion (or something to that effect). He said that later he was able to connect the dots.

It makes you wonder how he was handling the bureaucratic warfare. Did he have any recourse to being "forced" to retire?

A 2-star general (I think that's what his rank was) probably has little if any resources to resist pressures from those above him in the Army and Defense dept.

It's not like he could connect with a support group outside the Army and DOD, a la Ehren Watada.

From whom could he seek advice? If he tried to stay on, instead of retiring, would he have been exiled to some obscure basement in the Pentagon? (Maybe he already was in limbo.)