Word: pentagonal
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Many legislators, joined by the International Committee of the Red Cross, which monitors the Geneva Conventions, say these new rules violated the treaty and sowed the seeds for abuse. The Senate Armed Services Committee released a one-page document, "Interrogation Rules of Engagement," which the Pentagon claimed was produced by minor officers in the prison's military-intelligence brigade, that went into effect right after Miller's visit. The right column of the page outlined rough practices that could be used if Sanchez personally approved them. The list included sleep deprivation, stress positions, lengthy isolation, dietary manipulation and the presence...
...does responsibility go? Everyone agrees that the despicable treatment the 372nd inflicted at Abu Ghraib violated the Geneva Conventions, U.S. rules on interrogation and common decency. And no matter what superiors order, soldiers are ultimately culpable for their own actions. But across Capitol Hill, many also fault senior Pentagon civilians and brass for loosening the rules of interrogation in Iraq and the top guns of the Bush Administration for setting a tone of tolerance as far back as Sept. 11 that may have encouraged the abuse. While the Administration maintained that its rules and practices of interrogation adhered to international...
...week of congressional hearings, lawmakers struggled to trace the links in the chain of command. The White House, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and top brass in the Pentagon continued to insist that the abuses were confined to the sadistic impulses of the midnight shift at the prison. Senators and Representatives who crowded secure rooms on the Hill to watch nearly 1,800 unpublished pictures flash by, along with about half a dozen grainy videotapes, got a raw eyeful of just how perverse those particular soldiers had been. One of the videos seems to show a G.I. preparing to sodomize...
Hoping to cauterize the wound there and keep infection from higher-ups, Pentagon officials claimed that the misfits went wrong because of broad failings inside the prison. If anyone up the line was to blame, they said, it was the MP commander, Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, who paid too little attention to her rogue company. "My assessment," said Lieut. General Keith Alexander, the Army's deputy chief of staff for intelligence, "is there was a complete breakdown of discipline on the MP side." He was seconded on that point by Major General Antonio Taguba, author of the scathing Army inquiry...
...then Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz claimed they knew nothing of the tougher techniques allowing hard-pressure tactics. Though they have uncovered no paper trail, Senators were openly skeptical that Cambone and his bosses would have been in the dark about the procedures, since Miller reported directly to the Pentagon. Other Pentagon officials said Sanchez, at any rate, had never given anyone explicit permission to use such methods. And Rumsfeld told Senators that Pentagon lawyers had checked the rules thoroughly before judging Sanchez's list to be "consistent" with the Geneva Conventions. But according to Scott Horton of the Association...