Seymour Hersh on the Abu Ghraib torture::

“Myers, who was one of the military defense attorneys in the My Lai prosecutions of the nineteen-seventies, told me that his client’s defense will be that he was carrying out the orders of his superiors and, in particular, the directions of military intelligence. He said, ‘Do you really think a group of kids from rural Virginia decided to do this on their own? Decided that the best way to embarrass Arabs and make them talk was to have them walk around nude??’ “

So, indeed, it may have been ‘only following orders’ after all. Hersh describes a longstanding pattern of illegal cooperation by the forces guarding the military prisons both in Afghanistan and Iraq and OGAs — other government agencies, their euphemism for military intelligence — in “setting favorable conditions for subsequent interviews”, if you know what that means. An earlier Army investigation of MP practices either softpedaled or covered up the level of abuse. Of the current investigation leading to Article 32 proceedings against six enlisted GIs and their commander, Hersh says:

As the international furor grew, senior military officers, and President Bush, insisted that the actions of a few did not reflect the conduct of the military as a whole. Taguba’s report, however, amounts to an unsparing study of collective wrongdoing and the failure of Army leadership at the highest levels. The picture he draws of Abu Ghraib is one in which Army regulations and the Geneva conventions were routinely violated, and in which much of the day-to-day management of the prisoners was abdicated to Army military-intelligence units and civilian contract employees. Interrogating prisoners and getting intelligence, including by intimidation and torture, was the priority.

The mistreatment at Abu Ghraib may have done little to further American intelligence, however. Willie J. Rowell, who served for thirty-six years as a C.I.D. agent, told me that the use of force or humiliation with prisoners is invariably counterproductive. “They’ll tell you what you want to hear, truth or no truth,” Rowell said. “‘You can flog me until I tell you what I know you want me to say.’ You don’t get righteous information.” — New Yorker [via walker]