US: Pentagon Spends Billions to Outsource Torture

[bigtree]

by Joshua Holland, Alternet
September 14th, 2006
{snip}

According to Amnesty, half of the interrogators at Abu Ghraib were private contractors -- about 30 in all. Torin Nelson was a military intelligence officer at Gitmo before becoming a CACI interrogator at Abu Ghraib. After the scandal broke, Nelson resigned and charged the military with scapegoating a handful of low-level soldiers -- the only people who have been brought to trial for the abuses -- to "divert attention away from ingrained problems in the military detention and interrogation system." He said: "The problem with outsourcing intelligence work is the limit of oversight and control by the military administrators over the independent contractors."

"It's insanity," former CIA agent Robert Baer told The Guardian. "These are rank amateurs, and there is no legally binding law on these guys as far as I could tell. Why did they let them in the prison?"

Abu Ghraib was a perfect storm, destined to result in torture and murder. The Department of Justice was redefining torture to be "equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure," 90 percent of U.S. troops believed they were in Iraq for "retaliation for Saddam's role in 9/11" and, according to the Army, brigade leaders "failed to supervise or provide direct oversight, to properly discipline their soldiers ... and to provide continued mission-specific training." The results were those all-too-familiar images of grinning soldiers posed next to brutalized corpses on ice, stacks of naked prisoners, hooded prisoners in "stress positions" trussed in electrical cords and all the rest.

Amnesty notes that contractors "neither fall under the Military Code of Justice, nor are they answerable to Iraqi law, having been specifically excluded under a decree issued by Paul Bremer, the head of the U.S.-run administration in Iraq." Theoretically, a recent law, the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act, could be used to prosecute contractors, but the administration has not tried it out yet. According to the Legal Times, it's "narrowly crafted and ... may not cover some of the abuses -- and abusers -- involved in the torture of Iraqi detainees at U.S.-run prisons." It doesn't cover intelligence contractors working for the CIA.

That may be the whole point; critics have argued that one reason the United States has employed so many contractors to handle prisoners is to shield members of the military high command and their civilian leadership from culpability for war crimes or other violations of international and domestic laws.

http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=14118

[Supersedeas]

1. exporting Bush Country family values??

[sweetheart]

2. ronin are better

Why use traceable labour when you can buy perfect professional loyalty?

The problem here is that the constitution has been violated and the public budget
has been withheld illegally from public scrutiny. War will always need private
contractors to do the dirty jobs that are simply too polticially complex to achieve
by in-frame powers.

[redqueen]

3. Rumsfeld has to GO!

:nuke:

[Double T]

4. Psychopaths ALWAYS get someone else to execute...........

their 'dirty work'. There are ALWAYS plenty of henchmen ready to serve.

[Old and In the Way]

5. So we get our information second hand? Wow. Anyone else think

outsourcing our intelligence to a for-profit 3rd party might be a recipe for disaster?