The "few bad apples" defense is dead.
- U.S. News: "The top U.S. commander in Iraq, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, issued a classified order last November directing military guards to hide a prisoner, later dubbed 'Triple X' by soldiers, from Red Cross inspectors and keep his name off official rosters."
- The Washington Post: "In January 2002, for example, Rumsfeld approved the use of dogs to intimidate prisoners... Then, in April 2003, Rumsfeld approved the use in Guantanamo of at least five other high-pressure techniques also listed on the Oct. 9 Abu Ghraib memo, none of which was among the Army's standard interrogation methods."
- The Telegraph: "New evidence that the physical abuse of detainees in Iraq and at Guantanamo Bay was authorised at the top of the Bush administration will emerge in Washington this week... Four confidential Red Cross documents implicating senior Pentagon civilians in the Abu Ghraib scandal have been passed to an American television network, which is preparing to make them public shortly."
- The Times: "Beginning in November, a small unit of interrogators at Abu Ghraib prison began reporting allegations of prisoner abuse... The disclosure...raises new questions about whether senior officers in Iraq were alerted about serious abuses at the prison before January. Top military officials have said they only learned about abuses then, after a soldier came forward with photographs of the abuse."
THERE'S MORE: "It is going to get much worse," writes liberal hawk Christopher Hitchens, who appears to be coming back to his senses after a long bout of Bushphilia. "The graphic videos and photographs that have so far been shown only to Congress are, I have been persuaded by someone who has seen them, not likely to remain secret for very long. And, if you wonder why formerly gung-ho rightist congressmen like James Inhofe ('I'm outraged more by the outrage') have gone so quiet, it is because they have seen the stuff and you have not. There will probably be a slight difficulty about showing these scenes in prime time, but they will emerge, never fear. We may have to start using blunt words like murder and rape to describe what we see."
