5/26/2004

Just watched Colin Quinn prance around on his TV show dressed up as an American prison guard from Abu Ghraib and complain - after getting out of character - that his guests from Air America were harping on a few isolated cases where guards got out of hand and the whole torture scandal was overblown. Hope he reads tomorrow morning's New York Times: An Army summary of deaths and mistreatment involving prisoners in American custody in Iraq and Afghanistan shows a widespread pattern of abuse involving more military units than previously known. The cases from Iraq date back to April 15, 2003, a few days after Saddam Hussein's statue was toppled in a Baghdad square, and they extend up to last month, when a prisoner detained by Navy commandos died in a suspected case of homicide blamed on "blunt force trauma to the torso and positional asphyxia." Among previously unknown incidents are the abuse of detainees by Army interrogators from a National Guard unit attached to the Third Infantry Division, who are described in a document obtained by The New York Times as having "forced into asphyxiation numerous detainees in an attempt to obtain information" during a 10-week period last spring.

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