Obama administration engages in "non-denial denial" on abuse photos

New American, The, June 22, 2009

THE NEW AMERICAN reported in a May 29 online article that the Obama administration and Pentagon were engaging in "non-denial denial" when they supposedly denied a London Daily Telegraph story that they were suppressing photos of female rape and homosexual rape of teenage boys at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs ridiculed the British newspaper's story and told the White House press corps on May 27 that "none of the photographs in question depict the images described in the article. Again, I think if you do an even moderate Google search, you're not going to find many of these newspapers and truth within, say, 25 words of each other."

The next day (May 28), THE NEW AMERICAN reported: "It is possible that there are two entirely different sets of abusive photographs, based upon Gibbs' non-denial denial.... It reeks of public affairs-coached talking points. Why not simply say that it didn't happen, if indeed it didn't happen? Why is it that such finely parsed denials seem like they are in search of an "out" by claiming later (should photos verifying the British newspaper's account eventually be published) that the feds were talking about a different set of photos than what the London Daily Telegraph was writing about?"

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It now appears this was precisely the case, as the very next day (May 29) the Internet magazine Salon re ported that U.S. Army Major General Antonio Taguba said the British newspaper's account of his quote was accurate: "These pictures show torture, abuse, rape and every indecency." Since Taguba had been the two-star general in command of the 2004 Abu Ghraib investigation, he was in a position to see all the suppressed photos. Moreover, Taguba told Salon he wasn't sure if the photos he had described were among the set that the Obama administration had been seeking to prevent from public disclosure.

General Taguba's report also revealed that the overwhelming majority of detainees at Abu Ghraib had no connection to terrorism. Suspected terrorists were being funneled to Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan or Guantanamo. "These were people who were taken off the streets and put in jail--teen-agers and old men and women," he told the New Yorker shortly after retiring in 2007. "I kept on asking these questions of the officers I interviewed: 'You knew what was going on. Why didn't you do something to stop it?'"

The answer to that question was that the low-ranking soldiers were taking orders from Washington to engage in torture. "These M.E troops were not that creative," Taguba said. "Somebody was giving them guidance, but I was legally prevented from further investigation into higher authority. I was limited to a box."