Today’s Torture News

I hate having to write headlines like that one.

• New York Times, Red Cross President Plans Visit to Washington on Question of Detainees' Treatment…showing how seriously the Red Cross takes the US's apparent non-compliance with basic human rights norms
• Washington Post, U.S. Generals in Iraq Were Told of Abuse Early, Inquiry Finds: “A confidential report to Army generals in Iraq in December 2003 warned that members of an elite military and CIA task force were abusing detainees, a finding delivered more than a month before Army investigators received the photographs from Abu Ghraib prison that touched off investigations into prisoner mistreatment.”

  But did anyone do anything as a result of the report? We don't know:

  “Of the Herrington report, a Pentagon official said top generals in Iraq, including Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, who at the time directed U.S. forces there, reported the alleged abuses to officials at U.S. Central Command, which oversees military activities in the Middle East. The official said TF 121 was investigated, but he could not provide results.

  'The Herrington report was taken very seriously,' said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the report has not been released.”

• New York Times editorial, Abu Ghraib, Caribbean Style. Key quote:
  

  The White House, the Pentagon and the Justice Department clearly have no intention of addressing the abuse. Indeed, Mr. Bush has nominated one of the architects of the administration's prisoner policy, the White House counsel Alberto Gonzales, to be attorney general. The general who set up the system at Guantánamo is now in charge of prisons in Iraq.

  Only Congress can hold the administration accountable and begin to repair the damage to American values and America's image caused by the mistreatment of prisoners.

Have they gone mad in the White House or were they born that way?