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The BerkeleyanGeneral says Abu Ghraib scandal will resonate ‘for years to come’Even in retirement, Antonio Taguba, whose report on inmate abuse shed new light on the U.S. ‘war on terror,’ remains the good soldier and reluctant critic By Barry Bergman, Public Affairs | 13 February 2008
Major Gen. Antonio Taguba’s shattering report on the Abu Ghraib scandal was released in March 2004, effectively ending America’s claim to the moral high ground in its “war on terror” and making him, by all accounts, persona non grata at Donald Rumsfeld’s Pentagon. Notwithstanding his singular perspective from the eye of what became an international hurricane, Taguba waited until June 2007 — nearly six months from the day he retired, under pressure, after 34 years of active duty in the U.S. Army — before giving his first interview, to New Yorker investigative reporter Seymour Hersh.
Taguba, who made a rare public appearance on campus last week, never asked for that grisly, career-ending assignment. And he remains a reluctant critic of the nation he believed he was serving honorably by investigating allegations that U.S. military police had subjected inmates at the Baghdad prison to brutal and inhumane treatment. Taguba’s official report concluded that MPs had inflicted “sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuse” on prisoners in their custody; graphic photos, some of which were first aired by CBS News, showed GIs forcing Islamic detainees into sexually humiliating poses and threatening them with dogs.
Although his orders were to investigate no higher in the chain of command than the MP level, Taguba testified to Congress that the abuses stemmed from a “failure in leadership . . . from the brigade commander on down.” “The president,” he told Hersh, “had to be aware of this.”
At a time when the Iraq war still had the support of much of the U.S. electorate, the explosive revelations of abuse at Abu Ghraib — treatment Taguba found was meant to soften up prisoners for interrogation by U.S. intelligence officers — shook the military, the country, and the world. Yet if Taguba’s name and face remain unfamiliar to most Americans, that’s largely by design. He consented to speak at Berkeley — as he said from the stage of International House’s Chevron Auditorium — only due to the persistence of Rachel Shigekane, senior program manager for the campus Human Rights Center. He declined to give interviews in advance of his talk, agreeing to a brief meeting with the Berkeleyan only after he’d left the podium.
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