GENERAL WHITEWASH? SO FUCKING WHAT?

A newly released military investigation shows that interrogation tactics used on prisoners at Abu Ghraib in Iraq, right, were employed months earlier on detainees at Guantanamo, according to today’s Washington Post.

The report’s findings are the strongest indication yet that the abusive practices seen in photographs at Abu Ghraib were not the invention of a small group of thrill-seeking military police officers.

So fucking what if the techniques — which included hooding, shackling, stripping, sexual humiliation, sleep deprivation, and threatening dogs — were approved by U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld for use at Guantanamo in 2002? So fucking what if the Post reports that the investigation “supports the idea that soldiers believed [these] were approved interrogation techniques for use on detainees” at Abu Ghraib?

The Army has refused to term the tactics torture, calling them “creative” and “aggressive” instead. It has also refused to prosecute or discipline Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, who commanded the Guantanamo prison at the time “and later helped set up U.S. operations at Abu Ghraib,” even though “[w]ithin weeks of his departure from Abu Ghraib, military working dogs were being used in interrogations, and naked detainees were humiliated and abused by military police soldiers working the night shift.”

We knew all that stuff before. We knew it before the election last November. We knew it, and the majority of the American electorate didn’t fucking care. Why would it care now?