Just a moment...
medium.com

The revelations about the torture and abuse of detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq are a stain on the honor and reputation of the United States that will not soon be washed away. According to the available evidence, the mistreatment of prisoners at this American-run facility was not the work of a few “bad apples,” as the Bush administration would have us believe, but rather a systematic and widespread practice sanctioned at the highest levels of the U.S. government.

The majority of those incarcerated at Abu Ghraib — some 70 to 90 percent, according to one source — were in fact innocent of any wrongdoing. Yet these hapless individuals were subjected to a litany of horrors, including “physical abuse, sexual humiliation, physical and psychological torture, and rape.” The abuses were not limited to Abu Ghraib, but were part of a “wider pattern of torture and brutal treatment at American overseas detention centers, including those in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo Bay.”

  • Justice@lemmygrad.ml
    ·
    6 months ago

    Me when I open this article:

    Ctrl+F "CIA"

    Hmm, nothing

    "Central intelligence"

    Hmm, nothing

    Mainstream media still trying to never ever write or speak about what the CIA was using Abu Ghraib for.

    The tl;dr is the CIA was torturing and probably killing (via torture) "suspected terrorists" like right outside the prison. The horrors inside the prison and the constant flow of dead bodies from the surrounding area plus people dying from lack of treatment and whatever else inside the prison gave easy cover for the CIA to slip in torture victims and "ghost" them. "Disappear" the victims, basically. One of the major revelations which was never investigated in sort of real or proper way from the photos that got leaked was a photo of an obvious torture victim's corpse. The England Army lady is with the body in one of the pictures.

    There were once a bunch of calls for the CIA to declassify (and now 20 years on there is NO EXCUSE of "national security- not that this was ever real, but especially not now) all of their documents on what they were doing at Abu Ghraib, which agents or at least descriptions of types of agents and types of intel being sought and from whom for what purpose, etc. from the media and some portion of the public right after the pictures came out. Of course nothing was ever followed up on. The CIA has no actual means of being held accountable except by those who have absolutely no interest in holding it accountable.

    I don't think it needs to be really said, but, any actions a government feels it needs to hide from its own citizenry for years, two decades now, are surely fully unjustifiable actions. One of the most frustrating things (on a list seemingly infinitely long) about the American public is its total acceptance of the security state apparatus where everything is redacted, classified and compartmentalized so much so that even the president, if they wanted, would have trouble digging into things. I don't understand why or how people justify it in their minds. It's pure peasant brain really. "M'lord! M'lord! Please! Hide this from my simple mind! I am not worthy to read it, m'lord! Thank you!"