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Five Years of Shit Like This

Those who remained in captivity—along with all new prisoners seized by the military—were designated “security detainees,” a label that had gained currency in the war on terror, to describe “unlawful combatants” and other prisoners who had been denied P.O.W. status and could be held indefinitely, in isolation and secrecy, without judicial recourse.

And:

The abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib was de facto United States policy. The authorization of torture and the decriminalization of cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment of captives in wartime have been among the defining legacies of the current Administration; and the rules of interrogation that produced the abuses documented on the M.I. block in the fall of 2003 were the direct expression of the hostility toward international law and military doctrine that was found in the White House, the Vice-President’s office, and at the highest levels of the Justice and Defense Departments.

And:

The Abu Ghraib rules, promulgated by Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, the commander of ground forces in Iraq, elaborated on the interrogation rules for Guantánamo Bay, which had been issued by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld; they were designed to create far more license than restriction for interrogators who sought to break prisoners.

And:

The youngest prisoner on the tier was just ten years old. He was being held as a pawn in the military’s effort to capture or break his father.

From Exposure: The woman behind the camera at Abu Ghraib by Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris