General Antonio M. Taguba took a thankless job, told the truth, and paid a price. From Seymour Hersh at seymourhersh.substack.com:
When the US Army can’t face a painful truth about itself, it kills the messenger
General Antonio M. Taguba last week in Washington.
NOTE: Yevgeny Prigozhin, the Russian mercenary leader who died this week in a plane crash outside Moscow, was the subject of previous dispatches here and here.
It could have been a feel-good story—something badly needed in America today—about a bright Army general who did the right thing at a tough time and was duly rewarded. The general is Tony Taguba, a two-star officer who was born in the Philippines and made his way to college in America on a ROTC scholarship and, after graduation, began a 34-year career that brought him, after rapid promotions and high accolades, to the American war in Iraq in 2003.
Taguba was serving in the US military’s headquarters in Kuwait in 2004 when word of an impending scandal—one that was immediately understood to have implications as severe as the My Lai massacre in South Vietnam—stunned the top command. It concerned the Abu Ghraib prison, located twenty miles west of Baghdad. The notorious jail had long been shuttered prior to the US invasion of Iraq and overthrow of Saddam Hussein. It was renovated by the US and now held as many as 50,000 detained men and women. Most of them were believed to be linked to or have knowledge of the Al Qaeda opposition. The prisoners were confined in 12’-by-12’ cells that were, as I reported two decades ago, little more than holes in the ground.
I first learned of the tortures and other abuses that took place at Abu Ghraib late in 2003 while interviewing an ousted senior officer of the Iraqi air force. He took a dangerous seven-hour taxi ride from Baghdad to Damascus, where we met in an out-of-the-way hotel for three days. He wanted a way out of Iraq for his wife and two children, and I passed his name and contact information to various officials in Washington. One evening he brought up Abu Ghraib, about which I knew nothing, and told me that the US military, desperate to learn about the opposition in Iraq, had taken to seizing mothers and their children and jailing them there. The women were sending messages asking family members in Baghdad to come and kill them because they had been sexually abused by their American guards and interrogators.
