MSNBC.com chides foreign press for being critical of torture...seriously

Details from the infamous cache of hundreds of thousands of Iraq-related U.S. Army documents obtained by WikiLeaks are slowly being revealed. As reported in the New York Times (this link will take you to the MSNBC.com crosspost), the documents were released early to certain news organizations:

The Iraqi documents were made available to The Times, the British newspaper The Guardian, the French newspaper Le Monde and the German magazine Der Spiegel on the condition that they be embargoed until now.

This list also includes Al-Jazeera, by the way,

Now, MSNBC.com has an article out entitled "News organizations look at leak with different eyes". Here they accuse foreign media outlets of taking a staunch anti-American stance, with the exception of The Times:

The Guardian, Le Monde and Al-Jazeera splashed the more sensational revelations on their home pages under similar headlines skewering Washington for its inaction on Iraq's torture of more than 1,000 people.

• "Secret files reveal how US turned blind eye to Iraq torture," said The Guardian.
• "US turned blind eye to torture," Al-Jazeera said.
• "Iraq: The horror revealed by WikiLeaks," Le Monde said.

The Times' three equally played headlines, by contrast, revealed that "Reports Detail Iran Aid to Iraq Militias," "Civilians Paid War's Heaviest Toll" and "Detainees Suffered in Iraqi Hands." It characterized the U.S. response to allegations of Iraq torture as "brutality from which the Americans at times averted their eyes."

If you have a look at the New York Times article, you'll see that its a rather agnostic as well, and does not reveal much in the way of details from the actual documents.

Okay, so we have some news outlets taking one position on this story, and others taking a different one. That's what's supposed to happen, right? But if you have a look at The Guardian article about the documents - and I suggest that you do - you'll see that this is not really an issue that allows for a wide range of opinion. In fact, the documents reveal horrifying details of brutal torture, rape, and murder by Iraqi soldiers. Here is an excerpt from the article:

The numerous reports of detainee abuse, often supported by medical evidence, describe prisoners shackled, blindfolded and hung by wrists or ankles, and subjected to whipping, punching, kicking or electric shocks. Six reports end with a detainee's apparent death.

As recently as December the Americans were passed a video apparently showing Iraqi army officers executing a prisoner in Tal Afar, northern Iraq. The log states: "The footage shows approximately 12 Iraqi army soldiers. Ten IA soldiers were talking to one another while two soldiers held the detainee. The detainee had his hands bound … The footage shows the IA soldiers moving the detainee into the street, pushing him to the ground, punching him and shooting him."

The report named at least one perpetrator and was passed to coalition forces. But the logs reveal that the coalition has a formal policy of ignoring such allegations. They record "no investigation is necessary" and simply pass reports to the same Iraqi units implicated in the violence. By contrast all allegations involving coalition forces are subject to formal inquiries. Some cases of alleged abuse by UK and US troops are also detailed in the logs.

In two Iraqi cases postmortems revealed evidence of death by torture. On 27 August 2009 a US medical officer found "bruises and burns as well as visible injuries to the head, arm, torso, legs and neck" on the body of one man claimed by police to have killed himself. On 3 December 2008 another detainee, said by police to have died of "bad kidneys", was found to have "evidence of some type of unknown surgical procedure on [his] abdomen".

Here is the Pentagon's response to all of this, by the way, as pulled from the aforementioned MSNBC.com article:

A Pentagon official denied that Washington "ignored" the reports, telling NBC News that it passed along all claims to Iraq authorities and that "whatever they did with that information was up to the Iraqi government."

I'm sorry, but how is it that any right-thinking person can possibly believe that this is anything but a serious indictment of Pentagon and military protocol? Repeated allegations of brutal torture were merely "passed along" to Iraqi authorities. And they think that's okay? That's the best excuse that they can come up with?

We're not talking about an incident or two that got lost in the fog of war. We are talking about repeated allegations of brutal beatings and killings. How can MSNBC.com possibly think that the "splashing" of such revelations on the front pages of any newspaper constitutes a radical response?

I'm not saying that a witch hunt is in order to track down each and every individual responsible for this mess. But certainly it isn't asking too much to hold some sort of investigation in how this was allowed to happen, with promises from the Pentagon that it will review and improve relevant policies. This is torture that happened under the watch of the U.S. Army. This isn't something you can take lightly.