Get Your Blog Up

“This administration is populated by people who’ve spent their careers bashing government. They’re not just small-government conservatives—they’re Grover Norquist, strangle-it-in-the-bathtub conservatives. It’s a cognitive disconnect for them to be able to do something well in an arena that they have so derided and reviled all these years.”

Senator Hillary Clinton

Thursday, February 17, 2005

Gonzalez can prove he's against torture

Baltimore Sun:
American soldiers accused of detainee abuses tried to cover up their actions in at least two cases, allegedly threatening an Iraqi man with indefinite detention unless he recanted his claims of severe beatings and destroying photographs showing mock executions of Afghan detainees to prevent "another public outrage" after the Abu Ghraib prison scandal broke, military records released Thursday show.

The documents, internal files from eight newly disclosed Army criminal investigations, add to what human rights advocates say is a pattern of abuse at U.S. detention facilities in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The case from Afghanistan also suggests for the first time that military officials were aware of pictures separate from Abu Ghraib that showed soldiers humiliating detainees for amusement.

The ACLU is asking our new Attorney General to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate further. It will be interesting to see how he responds.