Documents Tell of Brutal Improvisation by GIs: they put an Iraqi Major General into a sleeping bag, wrapped him in electrical cord, and beat him until he died.
Two of the soldiers–enlisted men–are being tried for murder. (Their lawyer says that they shouldn’t be blamed as it was days of earlier torture–hitting the detainee with fists, a club and a length of rubber hose–that did him in.) The CIA’s role is being suppressed from the public accounts; there is no word as to whether the CIA’s operative will be prosecuted, although the “The CIA inspector general’s office has launched an investigation”.
An indicted soldier’s lawyer, not an unbiased source, is quoted by the Post as saying,
“The interrogation techniques were known and were approved of by the upper echelons of command of the 3rd ACR,” … “They believed, and still do, that they were appropriate and proper.”
Clearly, freedom is on the march.
Every jihadi will remember how, after the Mongol sack of Baghdad in 1258, Hulagu Khan killed the last Abbasid Caliph al-Musta’sim; the office had long been reduced to a figurehead, but was still a symbolically important one. The Mongols rolled the Caliph in a carpet and beat him to death (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hulagu_Khan). This was the traditional way – without shedding blood – the Mongols disposed of royalty, including their own, but the Arabs must have thought it a macabre and alien cruelty. I’m sure they think of the Americans as latter-day Mongols, an irresistible military force without civilisation.