Grand Jury Investigates Torture In Abu Ghraib Death

Time:

It has been nearly a decade since Manadel al-Jamadi, an Iraqi prisoner known as "the Iceman" — for the bungled attempt to cool his body and make him look less dead — perished in CIA custody at Abu Ghraib. But now there are rumbles in Washington that the notorious case, as well as other alleged CIA abuses, could be returning to haunt the agency. TIME has learned that a prosecutor tasked with probing the CIA — John Durham, a respected, Republican-appointed U.S. Attorney from Connecticut — has begun calling witnesses before a secret federal grand jury in Alexandria, Va., looking into, among other things, the lurid Nov. 4, 2003, homicide, which was documented by TIME in 2005.

Read the whole story: Time

Comments

[americaisracist]

11:36 PM on 06/14/2011

he will look into it and find Cheney and his SS innocent. case will be closed forever in USA law. but it will never be closed with the people in the world who have a clue

[Progressneeded]

10:03 PM on 06/14/2011

Really! They are going to investigate? Why bother, the real criminals will go untouched.

[osofar]

09:14 PM on 06/14/2011

Torture never works as well as persuasion and a relationship between the interrogater and the prisoner. Torture brutalizes the torturer, and doesn't work. Once a nation tortures, it loses any high ground of morality it might have once had. Torture is a Hollywood approach, not a rational way to gleen information. Under torture, you will say anything to get the torture to stop. Lies and untruth is the only intelligence garnered. Brutality never achieves as much as a professional relationship between staff and prisoner.

[Tuigim]

06:13 PM on 06/14/2011

Why America has no moral credibility:
“we don’t care a damn about Iraqi lives” from http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20080411_semantics_cant_mask_bushs_chicanery/ , Robert Fisk pointing out the obvious back in 2008.

Three years later and the deception continues.

YES, get the criminals (guards) at Abu Ghraib and send a loud message
that such hellish acts do NOT do unpunished.
But for God’s sake don’t stop at the guards.
Go after the propaganda merchants
and war “architects”
and those who profited and still profit from the blood of the innocents.

[JBDenver]

04:24 PM on 06/14/2011

Was his head still attached to his shoulders?

[StanMann]

02:30 PM on 06/14/2011

Mormons DeLand and McCotter were sent to Abu Ghraib and was over the prison. With the newly minted tortures of Mormons Mitchell and Jessen. Sadly, isn't it some poor woman general got to take the fall..... Mitchell and Jessen were living high on the hog, with money flowing to them.

Deland and McCotter were well known for their tortures within U.S. prisons and were under investigation when they were tapped to go to Abu Ghraib.

wonder if some poor flunky will get pinned with the blame -- or will these Mormon tortures be held accountable?

[Observer111]

02:01 PM on 06/14/2011

US put itself on the same plate as terrorists with torture, water boarding, secret prisons, indefinite detention without trial, drone democracy and extrajudicial executions. This is not a war of attrition like WWII so the number of terrorists, real or phantom, ki.lled is not important. It's more about losses that US takes...7,000 body bags from Middle East and $2 tr of militaristic expenses is pretty bad. At the end, it will end like in Vietnam. Misguided potuses draw the country into quagmire (Pentagon Papers is a great source, thanks to whistle blowers) and after losing 58,000 people US withdraw, the Vietnamese are still there.

[StanMann]

02:30 PM on 06/14/2011

It's a Mormon thing... Bybee, Yoo, Hatch, etc. all behind it.

[INDIVIDUALTERRY]

03:17 PM on 06/14/2011

Is anti-Morman becoming the new anti-semite ?
You seem to have a thing for Mormans.

[robnelsong]

01:47 PM on 06/14/2011

Having just read Laura Hillenbrand's remarkable book, "Unbroken" which describes in excruciating detail the barbarity of the Japanese toward American and other WW II POWs, it saddens me that Americans have resorted to many of the same techniques and procedures toward "illegal enemy combatants". The very same words were used by the WW II era Japanese authorities to categorize some captured American soldiers. This practice is a national disgrace.

[INDIVIDUALTERRY]

03:24 PM on 06/14/2011

There is no comparison , no way , no how.

[robnelsong]

06:03 PM on 06/14/2011

Read Hillenbrand's book and then decide. The Japanese waterboarded prisoners, made them assume contorted positions for hours on end, declared soldiers as illegal enemy combatants, and killed unarmed men. Sadly, the US has committed similar atrocities. Granted, the Japanese mistreatment of prisoners was far more widespread, but the US should never have engaged in such illegal activities.

[blood1]

11:45 AM on 06/14/2011

OMFG: did someone actually use the "T" word or is HP just making up a headline? If in fact this is true, I'm willing to bet a nickel that GOP will say this is a "one-off", an outlier...now please move on, after all we wrote documents to say that Torture wasn't REALLY TORTURE.

Naysayer: pull the Levin / Petraus hearings off the web, it is better than any novel you will ever read!

[antipodal2u]

11:07 AM on 06/14/2011

Chyea. Lets go UP the chain of command and punish those responsible instead of going down and making patsies out of our soldiers following orders

[gino618]

11:45 AM on 06/14/2011

Well - the top commander in Iraq at the time was General Sanchez - the same one the Democrats want to run for office in Texas. You can start there.

[mabinog]

10:58 AM on 06/14/2011

ten years - of course had to wait till all the important people who might be implicated had distanced themselves from it.

[gatos1014]

10:21 AM on 06/14/2011

The mass murderer that should be on trial is the little deserter George Bush.

[Vincent Van Der Hyde]

12:31 PM on 06/14/2011

I love that depiction. "...the little deserter George Bush." It really captures the essence of the creep.

[INDIVIDUALTERRY]

10:09 AM on 06/14/2011

Much ado over nothing.
We have wars to finish and an economy to revive .
All that really matters is the intell he produced before he ....expired.

[PWM]

10:54 AM on 06/14/2011

What an unamerican thing to say.

[INDIVIDUALTERRY]

11:35 AM on 06/14/2011

We could have followed the rules of the enemy and stuck his head on a pike as a warning to others.
But we handicap ourselfs with PC rules to placate the more ...sensitive amoung us.

[bbarnezz]

11:58 AM on 06/14/2011

un-American. :)

[landgoddess]

12:04 PM on 06/14/2011

You and your kind are scary.

[TommyCooper]

09:49 AM on 06/14/2011

Guantanamo detainees were tortured to death, say families:

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/06/13/guantanamo-detainees-were-tortured-to-death-say-families/

WASHINGTON — The families of two detainees who died in Guantanamo Bay in 2006 on Monday challenged the government's assertion that the prisoners committed suicide, saying they were tortured to death.

[Sinister Minister]

09:46 AM on 06/14/2011

Back in the late sixties I told people that we should not cede our rights under the fourth amendment for the sake of Nixon's drug war. Many people still don't understand why.

Always remember that whatever power you allow the government to have to go after your enemies, can and will be used against you.

If you don't believe the same people in congress that would protect people that perpetrated these crimes against our enemies would do the same when they are used against Americans, you are in for a rude awakening.

Does anyone believe the British would have punished their soldiers for abusing the early American colonists? We have become what we overthrew. So much for the "Grand Experiment" called government of the people for the people.

[INDIVIDUALTERRY]

01:33 PM on 06/14/2011

Just wait untill Obama raises and equips his new civilian army. Armed with the Patriot Act.

[Lock Piatt]

03:55 PM on 06/14/2011

Not going to happen - like the old R&R song "ITS OVER"