The Conscience of Joe Darby - GQ article on Abu Ghraib prison whistle blower

The Conscience of Joe Darby:

(Absolutely amazing article about the effects on Joe's family. Please read the entire article)

"Like, one thing Bernadette didn't know—because almost nobody knows it, because almost everybody who does know has either been lying or keeping it a secret—is the rest of the story, what really happened at Abu Ghraib. Oh, you hear allusions to the fact that certain things haven't been told, like Rumsfeld saying in May that the whole story is 'a good deal more terrible' than what you've seen. But you don't hear Rumsfeld saying any more than that, or explaining what 'more terrible' means.


You don't hear anybody explaining, for example, how Private Lynndie England, the woman in so many of those pictures, the one smiling and laughing and giving the thumbs-up, wasn't even supposed to be in the cellblock, how she didn't have any police authority and shouldn't have been dealing with inmates in the first place. You don't hear much of anything about her job, because the truth is, her job was something else entirely. Lynndie England was an administration clerk; not an MP like Joe but the equivalent of a secretary. 'She was assigned to an MP unit,' says Blake Ellis, a paralegal with England's defense team, 'but she wasn't an MP. She did not have any police authority. She was not supposed to be walking tiers or working with inmates.'


If you don't believe him, how about the brigadier general who ran the whole prison? Janis Karpinski says that England had absolutely no business working with inmates and suggests that the only reason England was on the cellblock was because her boyfriend, Charles Graner, had invited her. 'Graner's original claim, before he clammed up,' Karpinski says, 'was that the interrogators told him to get a female over there and he thought of her immediately.'


Sound like procedure to you?


Then there's Sivits. Guess what? Not an MP, either. No business being in a cellblock, no business interacting with detainees. This is a prison with 300 military police on duty, and they've got a mechanic up at one in the morning taking pictures while they terrorize prisoners."

That it really wasn't about softening prisoners, gathering intelligence, or trying to win the war. That it wasn't even about losing control in the heat of the moment. It was about getting up in the middle of the night and going somewhere you weren't supposed to go, then beating and raping people there. It was premeditated violent crime.