In a not unexpected move, an internal Army investigation has resulted in a whole lot of nothing - except for 94 reported cases of abuse and "at least" three dozen deaths.
Maybe I'm naive - I admit I know nothing about how jails are run - but I have a very hard time understanding how 36 people can die in custody and it can all be attributed to "unauthorized actions taken by a few individuals, and in some cases coupled with the failure of a few leaders to provide adequate supervision and leadership."
Other points that seem to indicate that this report is a bunch of hogwash - Lt. Gen. Paul Mikolashek, the Army's inspector general, seems to have decided to ignore some critical areas, such as the so-called 'ghost prisons'.
Mikolashek said he found "no evidence" of so-called ghost detainees, prisoners kept off the books by U.S. forces and hidden from the International Committee of the Red Cross.But he said he was not disputing either Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba's report on Abu Ghraib that exposed and criticized the practice, or Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who said he ordered the secret detention of an Iraqi prisoner held for more than seven months without notifying the ICRC.
"We did not go back and do a post mortem on that particular issue," Mikolashek said.
As I said, none of this is unexpected. And given the proximity of the 9/11 commission's report, this one is going to be buried.
