AP: Rep. Katherine Harris, the former Florida secretary of state who oversaw the disputed 2000 presidential election, admits she's responsible for a vote going uncounted -- her own. Harris forgot to sign her absentee ballot when she voted in Longboat Key's local election March 9. "I feel terrible," the Republican said Friday. "It's a mistake. I regret it." (via Political Wire)

Editorial: A failure of leadership at the highest levels

Around the halls of the Pentagon, a term of caustic derision has emerged for the enlisted soldiers at the heart of the furor over the Abu Ghraib prison scandal: the six morons who lost the war.

Indeed, the damage done to the U.S. military and the nation as a whole by the horrifying photographs of U.S. soldiers abusing Iraqi detainees at the notorious prison is incalculable.

But the folks in the Pentagon are talking about the wrong morons.

There is no excuse for the behavior displayed by soldiers in the now-infamous pictures and an even more damning report by Army Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba. Every soldier involved should be ashamed.

But while responsibility begins with the six soldiers facing criminal charges, it extends all the way up the chain of command to the highest reaches of the military hierarchy and its civilian leadership.

The entire affair is a failure of leadership from start to finish. From the moment they are captured, prisoners are hooded, shackled and isolated. The message to the troops: Anything goes.

In addition to the scores of prisoners who were humiliated and demeaned, at least 14 have died in custody in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Army has ruled at least two of those homicides. This is not the way a free people keeps its captives or wins the hearts and minds of a suspicious world.

How tragically ironic that the American military, which was welcomed to Baghdad by the euphoric Iraqi people a year ago as a liberating force that ended 30 years of tyranny, would today stand guilty of dehumanizing torture in the same Abu Ghraib prison used by Saddam Hussein’s henchmen.

One can only wonder why the prison wasn’t razed in the wake of the invasion as a symbolic stake through the heart of the Baathist regime.

Army commanders in Iraq bear responsibility for running a prison where there was no legal adviser to the commander, and no ultimate responsibility taken for the care and treatment of the prisoners.

Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, also shares in the shame. Myers asked “60 Minutes II” to hold off reporting news of the scandal because it could put U.S. troops at risk. But when the report was aired, a week later, Myers still hadn’t read Taguba’s report, which had been completed in March. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld also failed to read the report until after the scandal broke in the media.

By then, of course, it was too late. Myers, Rumsfeld and their staffs failed to recognize the impact the scandal would have not only in the United States, but around the world.

If their staffs failed to alert Myers and Rumsfeld, shame on them. But shame, too, on the chairman and secretary, who failed to inform even President Bush. He was left to learn of the explosive scandal from media reports instead of from his own military leaders.

On the battlefield, Myers’ and Rumsfeld’s errors would be called a lack of situational awareness — a failure that amounts to professional negligence.

The one anti-war argument that, in retrospect, I did not take seriously enough was a simple one. It was that this war was noble and defensible but that this administration was simply too incompetent and arrogant to carry it out effectively. I dismissed this as facile Bush-bashing at the time. I was wrong. I sensed the hubris of this administration after the fall of Baghdad, but I didn't sense how they would grotesquely under-man the post-war occupation, bungle the maintenance of security, short-change an absolutely vital mission, dismiss constructive criticism, ignore even their allies (like the Brits), and fail to shift swiftly enough when events span out of control. This was never going to be an easy venture; and we shouldn't expect perfection. There were bound to be revolts and terrorist infractions. The job is immense; and many of us have rallied to the administration's defense in difficult times, aware of the immense difficulties involved. But to have allowed the situation to slide into where we now are, to have a military so poorly managed and under-staffed that what we have seen out of Abu Ghraib was either the result of a) chaos, b) policy or c) some awful combination of the two, is inexcusable. It is a betrayal of all those soldiers who have done amazing work, who are genuine heroes, of all those Iraqis who have risked their lives for our and their future, of ordinary Americans who trusted their president and defense secretary to get this right. To have humiliated the United States by presenting false and misleading intelligence and then to have allowed something like Abu Ghraib to happen - after a year of other, compounded errors - is unforgivable. By refusing to hold anyone accountable, the president has also shown he is not really in control. We are at war; and our war leaders have given the enemy their biggest propaganda coup imaginable, while refusing to acknowledge their own palpable errors and misjudgments. They have, alas, scant credibility left and must be called to account. Shock has now led - and should lead - to anger. And those of us who support the war should, in many ways, be angrier than those who opposed it.

For someone who considers himself in many ways a hawk and who did and does believe in American power as a force for good in the world (most recently in the Balkans) it is difficult to describe the depth of the chagrin over watching the unfolding of a story which reads in many ways like a parody of Chomskian screeds against American villainy.

As I think is already becoming clear, the responsibility for all of this goes right to the very top -- to the President, the Secretary of Defense, the Vice President and many others. The point isn't that the president ordered or knew specifically that soldiers in Iraq were setting attack dogs on to naked prisoners or all the other outrages we're about to hear of. But going back almost three years these men made very conscious and specific decisions to disregard or opt out of the various international conventions, rules and traditions governing the treatment of prisoners of war and enemy combatants that are intended to prevent such things from happening.

It may be true that in this one MP Unit things got particularly out of hand. But even the instructions from above they and other unit appear to have been getting from superiors were quite bad enough.

Within weeks after September 11, senior officials at the Pentagon and the White House began the drive to maximize American freedom of action. They attacked specifically the Geneva Conventions, which govern behavior during wartime. Donald Rumsfeld explained that the conventions did not apply to today's "set of facts." He and his top aides have tried persistently to keep prisoners out of the reach of either American courts or international law, presumably so that they can be handled without those pettifogging rules as barriers. Rumsfeld initially fought both the uniformed military and Colin Powell, who urged that prisoners in Guantanamo be accorded rights under the conventions. Eventually he gave in on the matter but continued to suggest that the protocols were antiquated. Last week he said again that the Geneva Conventions did not "precisely apply" and were simply basic rules. The conventions are not exactly optional. They are the law of the land, signed by the president and ratified by Congress....
The basic attitude taken by Rumsfeld, Cheney and their top aides has been "We're at war; all these niceties will have to wait." As a result, we have waged pre-emptive war unilaterally, spurned international cooperation, rejected United Nations participation, humiliated allies, discounted the need for local support in Iraq and incurred massive costs in blood and treasure. If the world is not to be trusted in these dangerous times, key agencies of the American government, like the State Department, are to be trusted even less. Congress is barely informed, even on issues on which its "advise and consent" are constitutionally mandated.

Leave process aside: the results are plain. On almost every issue involving postwar Iraq—troop strength, international support, the credibility of exiles, de-Baathification, handling Ayatollah Ali Sistani—Washington's assumptions and policies have been wrong. By now most have been reversed, often too late to have much effect. This strange combination of arrogance and incompetence has not only destroyed the hopes for a new Iraq. It has had the much broader effect of turning the United States into an international outlaw in the eyes of much of the world.

Whether he wins or loses in November, George W. Bush's legacy is now clear: the creation of a poisonous atmosphere of anti-Americanism around the globe. I'm sure he takes full responsibility.

Red Cross Found Widespread Abuse Of Iraqi Prisoners

Confidential Report Says Agency Briefed U.S. Officials On Concerns Repeatedly
By DAVID S. CLOUD, CARLA ANNE ROBBINS and GREG JAFFE
Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
May 7, 2004 3:13 p.m.

WASHINGTON -- A confidential and previously undisclosed Red Cross report delivered to the Bush administration earlier this year concluded that abuse of prisoners in Iraq in custody of U.S. military intelligence was widespread and in some cases "tantamount to torture."

Among other allegations, the report says prisoners were kept naked in empty cells at Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison; that prisoners were beaten by coalition forces, in one case leading to death; that coalition forces fired on unarmed prisoners multiple times from watchtowers, killing some of them; and that coalition forces committed "serious violations" of the Geneva Conventions governing treatment of prisoners of war.

'TANTAMOUNT TO TORTURE'

Overall, the 24-page report, based on International Committee of the Red Cross inspections and interviews in Iraq from March to November 2003, alleges that prisoners in intelligence interrogations were subjected to harsh and often brutal treatment as part of a regular practice of trying to "obtain confessions and extract information."

The February report, reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, presents a portrait of prisoner treatment in Iraq that is at odds with statements by administration officials that abuse wasn't condoned by military commanders and was limited to a handful of low-ranking soldiers.

Instead, the report says, information gathered by the ICRC "suggested the use of ill-treatment against persons deprived of their liberty went beyond exceptional cases and might be considered a practice tolerated by" coalition forces.

...The U.S. Army, which was in regular contact with ICRC about its allegations, launched an inquiry into conditions at Abu Ghraib on Jan. 14, the day after photos of abused prisoners were passed up the chain of command. Some of the photos have become public in the last week, stirring anger at the U.S. around the world and spurring new questions about the war and occupation.

It could not be learned last night how widely read the ICRC report was among senior Bush administration officials. U.S. officials said yesterday that Secretary of State Colin Powell, for instance, had raised the problems with detention procedures at several high-level administration meetings this year. A State Department official said last night that he couldn't say when Mr. Powell first saw the report. But he noted that the ICRC had been making recommendations and raising concerns for a long time, and that Mr. Powell and other administration officials had been aware of that.

The ICRC report specifies that its findings were made available to the U.S. as part of a "bilateral and confidential dialogue."

A spokesman for U.S. Central Command, which oversees U.S. troops in the Middle East, said the command had not received the report.

The report says Red Cross officials repeatedly briefed U.S. officials about their concerns regarding prisoner mistreatment beginning just after the war ended in May and continuing until the report was completed in February.

In mid-October, ICRC officials visited a section of Abu Ghraib where they witnessed "the practice of keeping persons completely naked in totally empty concrete cells in total darkness, allegedly for several consecutive days," the report says.

Upon witnessing the treatment in the prison, which included making male prisoners parade around in women's underwear, ICRC officials complained to the military intelligence officer in charge, who explained that the practice was "part of the process," the report says.

Despite the ICRC's October inspection and warning of abuse at Abu Ghraib in October 2003, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told reporters earlier this week that the allegations of guards sexually humiliating and abusing inmates at the facility didn't surface until Jan. 13, three months after the ICRC complained of the problem to military officials in Iraq.

In another episode detailed in the report, nine men were arrested by coalition forces in the city of Basra last September and taken to offices formerly used by the Iraqi intelligence service. There, according to allegations gathered by the ICRC, they were "beaten severely by [Coalition Forces] personnel."

One of those arrested, 28-year-old Baha Daoud Salim, died. "His co-arrestees heard him screaming and asking for assistance," the report says.

His death certificate, prepared by coalition forces, listed "cardio-respiratory arrest-asphyxia" as the condition leading to death, but said the cause of death was "unknown," the report says. An eyewitness description of the body reported a broken nose, several broken ribs and lesions on the face consistent with a beating, it notes.

The report also documents eight instances in which coalition forces opened fire -- in some cases from watchtowers -- on unarmed prisoners, killing seven of them and wounding as many as 20. "These incidents were investigated summarily by the coalition forces," the report states, noting that in all cases the coalition determined that "a legitimate use of firearms had been made."

The ICRC, however, disagreed, saying that in all cases "less extreme measures could have been used to quell the demonstrations," according to the report. In one case, a prisoner throwing stones was shot through the chest by a guard in a watchtower. The military said the shooting was justified. The ICRC, however, said the shooting "showed a clear disregard for human life and security" of prisoners.

...The report does document cases in which ICRC complaints achieved changes in practices. In May 2003, it says, after a memo detailing 200 allegations of mistreatment was given to Rear Adm. James Robb, non-Iraqi detainees were no longer forced to wear wristbands that read "terrorist."

The report notes that "ill-treatment during interrogation was not systematic, except with regard to persons arrested with suspected security offenses or deemed to have an intelligence value." Treatment of prisoners in military intelligence custody improved if they cooperated, the report says. It notes that when prisoners were transferred to facilities under control of military police, treatment also generally improved.

Last July, the ICRC sent the U.S. a report detailing 50 allegations of prisoner abuse at the military intelligence section of Camp Cropper, at Baghdad International Airport. Detainees were subjected to a variety of techniques aimed at pressuring them, the report says.

They included soldiers "taking aim at individuals with rifles, striking them with rifle butts, slaps and punches and prolonged exposure to the sun." One prisoner claimed he was "urinated on, kicked in the head, lower back and groin, force-fed a baseball, which was tied into the mouth using a scarf and deprived of sleep for four consecutive days."

… the man who directed the reopening of the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq last year and trained the guards there resigned under pressure as director of the Utah Department of Corrections in 1997 after an inmate died while shackled to a restraining chair for 16 hours. The inmate, who suffered from schizophrenia, was kept naked the whole time.

The Utah official, Lane McCotter, later became an executive of a private prison company, one of whose jails was under investigation by the Justice Department when he was sent to Iraq as part of a team of prison officials, judges, prosecutors and police chiefs picked by Attorney General John Ashcroft to rebuild the country’s criminal justice system.

In Arizona, male inmates at the Maricopa County jail in Phoenix are made to wear women’s pink underwear as a form of humiliation. At Virginia’s Wallens Ridge maximum security prison, new inmates have reported being forced to wear black hoods, in theory to keep them from spitting on guards, and said they were often beaten and cursed at by guards and made to crawl. … [S]ome of the worst abuses have occurred in Texas, [where] guards were allowing inmate gang leaders to buy and sell other inmates as slaves for sex.