Was Release of Torture Info Timed to Distract?
By: Rowan Wolf at Uncommon Thought Journal

This article is under a "fair use" Creative Commons license

General Myers asked 60 Minutes II to delay the release of the pictures from Abu Ghraib. Was it to prepare a response, or to time it with other events? Given the testimony of Rumsfeld, Myers, and Bush, apparently it wasn't to read Taguba's or other reports. It wasn't to launch a response to the problems. So why wait?

What was the BIG news prior to the public knowledge of Abu Ghraib? I believe that it was the 9-11 Committee hearings. In specific, it was the meeting of George Bush and Richard Cheney with the 9-11 Commission.

What was another BIG thing going on? A couple of Supreme Court cases related to detention of prisoners in the war on terrorirsm - Hamdi and Padilla. I discussed these briefly in Totally Ticked Off (4/28/04). And the connection of distraction is raised in this piece on The Daily Kos - Abu Ghraib and Gitmo (5/10/04). This ties directly to questions of detainees rights and the conditions of detainment being used by the US in the "war on terrorism."

Also on the Supreme's docket was Cheney's use of Executive Prvilege to not release the documents and names linked to the infamous Bush "energy" plan. Hmm.

Another piece of BIG news that has gotten lost in the issue of detainee abuse and torture also relates to the 9-11 investigation - Tape of Air Traffic Controllers Made on 9/11 Was Destroyed (5/07/04, NYT). A tape was made on the morning of 9/11/01 by air traffic controllers at the New York Air Route Traffic Control Center, in Ronkonkoma, N.Y. The controllers had felt it was important to document what they had seen, actions they had taken, and orders they had received. A transcript was never made of the tape. Sometime between December 2001 and February 2002 a quality assurance manager took it upon himself to destroy the tape by breaking it up and scattering the tape in multiple trash barrels. Why?

According to the QA manager :" he had destroyed the tape because he thought making it was contrary to Federal Aviation Administration policy, which calls for written statements, and because he felt that the controllers "were not in the correct frame of mind to have properly consented to the taping" because of the stress of the day." This was after a memo had been issued by the FAA"instructing officials to safeguard all records and adding, "If a question arises whether or not you should retain data, RETAIN IT.""

I'm sure there are other things that should go here, but these seem rather major. I am not saying that we should not be focusing on the events that have come to light (finally) about the abuse and torture of detainees by the US (and UK), rather that the timing of the release seems to have been coincidentally scripted to obscure other events. I have not one word of what actually came out of the Whitehouse "meeting." The Supreme Court cases go directly to issues related to the abuse of detainees and issues of transparency and law.

I just raise the coincidence. You can make of it what you will.