GET THE MAY 24TH NEW YORKER. there's an article by seymour hersh that everyone's been talking about, because it completely lays out how we came to this. basically it started in afghanistan where military special forces were frustrated b/c they had to get approval before firing on suspected al quaeda. this really pissed rumsfeld off b/c they lost a lot of targets that way. so this top-secret "special access program" was implemented that gave an elite, secret force approval ahead of time to basically do whatever they needed to get people & to get intelligence. this worked well in the chaos of afghanistan. but then they had the bright idea of bringing that unbridled freedom into the structured war zone of iraq, where of course it clashed with the military structure already in place. so these hicks really were told that they could do whatever they wanted, & that they were expected to create interrogation-conducive conditions, & it really was very unclear who was in charge in this prison because intellegence people were suddenly thrown in the mix with regular old army people, etc...only the hicks don't know anything about the secret program. so when the army's criminal investigation program started looknig into it all the people in teh know---from rumsfeld on down--basically decided they had to let the investigation go on but w/o revealing the secret program. ie: let the only people in the chain who DON'T know about the program--the hicks at the prison--take the fall. this was going on when rummy & the others testified before congress. it's SO FUCKING UPETTING.
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