A Few “Bad Apples”
Kevin Hayden at American Street provides a an introduction and link to a MSNBC report: Gitmo interrogations spark battle over tactics.
Before you go read part one of a two-part report there is something you should know that isn’t totally clear from the article. These investigators are the military’s criminal investigators who gather evidence for courts martial, not civilian criminal cases. The administration was talking about creating military tribunals to try those charged as “enemy combatants” and these people worked under the military’s rules of procedure for trials, which are a bit different than those of civilian courts.
These investigators are complaining about tactics that are unacceptable for military trials and they complained all the way to the top of their chain of command, Rumsfeld himself.
These complaints went up the chain of command early in 2002, well before the Iraq war. The DoD can’t claim they didn’t know what was going on, because they had been told about the techniques in use almost two years before Abu Ghraib was revealed.
The investigators told them this would blow up on them, but they did it anyway.
Update: Part 2 is now available.
