Sy Hersh joined Wolf on CNN this morning to talk about his new piece in The New Yorker: “How Antonio Taguba, who investigated the Abu Ghraib scandal, became one of its casualties.” It’s another important story that Sy has brought to our attention. The lies that were told about the Abu Ghraid scandal are staggering as this WH implemented torture into its playbook and the soul of America.
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HERSH: Very simply that the notion, as they told Congress, that our leader, Rumsfeld, Donald Rumsfeld, the secretary of defense and his aides, they all went and testified in May after the stories about Abu Ghraib became public that “Oh, my god, we just didn’t know about it until — we didn’t realize how serious it was” is simply not true.
The fact is that, within a few days of the incident first getting reported internally, which was in January of ‘04, the back channel was flying. There were messages going. And the back channel showed very clearly the documents – the actual cables show that Rumsfeld and his aides and Wolfowitz and his aides and the director of the Joint staff, all these senior people at the Pentagon were getting very detailed — they didn’t see the photographs; they were getting verbal accounts of the photographs that made it very clear.
It doesn’t pay to do a thorough investigation for this White House as Major Gen. Taguba found out, but what about Bush’s role in all of this?
Whether the President was told about Abu Ghraib in January (when e-mails informed the Pentagon of the seriousness of the abuses and of the existence of photographs) or in March (when Taguba filed his report), Bush made no known effort to forcefully address the treatment of prisoners before the scandal became public, or to reëvaluate the training of military police and interrogators, or the practices of the task forces that he had authorized. Instead, Bush acquiesced in the prosecution of a few lower-level soldiers. The President’s failure to act decisively resonated through the military chain of command: aggressive prosecution of crimes against detainees was not conducive to a successful career.
(full transcript via CNN below the fold)