1115.org

If you thought we only torture detainees and enemy combatants, you were wrong. If you thought we only kidnap terrorist suspects, again you were wrong.

Maybe this just proves the old slippery slope adage. But, apparently, our torture and kidnapping resumé includes entries relating to the minor children of Abu Ghraib detainees. If the standard Abu Ghraib treatment wasn’t enough to make them sing, we simply went to Plan B. Funny how that usually seemed to work. (Which is not to say there wasn’t a Plan C, that we might learn about a little further down the road.)

Here’s Salon with the story (As you read through it, do pause every few paragraphs and remind yourself that the President has certified that 99.9% of our soldiers in Iraq are decent, honorable men and women who deserve our admiration. How is it that the other 0.1% seem to be everywhere at once?):

It now appears that kidnapping, scarcely covered by the media, and absent in the major military investigations of detainee abuse, may have been systematically employed by U.S. troops. Salon has obtained Army documents that show several cases where U.S. forces abducted terror suspects’ families.
[…]
In a hearing before Shays’ Government Reform subcommittee last February, … (Army Spc. Samuel Provance, a whistle-blower,) made the disturbing allegation that interrogators broke an Iraqi general, Hamid Zabar, by imprisoning and abusing his frail 16-year-old son. (Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif.) was shocked. “Do you think this practice was repeated with other children?” he asked Provance. “I don’t see why it would not have been, sir,” Provance replied.

Zabar’s son had been apprehended with his father and held at Abu Ghraib, though the boy hadn’t done anything wrong. “He was useless,” Provance said about the boy in a phone interview with Salon from Heidelberg, Germany, where he is still in the Army. “He was of no intelligence value.”

But, Provance said, interrogators grew frustrated when the boy’s father, Zabar, wouldn’t talk, despite a 14-hour interrogation. So they stripped Zabar’s son naked and doused him with mud and water. They put him in the open back of a truck and drove around in the frigid January night air until the boy began to freeze. Zabar was then made to look at his suffering son.

“During the interrogation, they could not get him to talk,” Provance recalled. “They said, ‘OK, we are going to let you see your son.’ They allow him to see his son in this shivering, freezing, naked state,” Provance said. “That just totally broke his heart and that is when he said, ‘I’ll tell you what you want to know.’”

Heartwarming story, what? But it doesn’t stop there.

Provance’s account does not appear to be an isolated allegation.
[…]
In 2003, Iraqi Maj. Gen. Abed Hamed Mowhoush died in U.S. custody in northern Iraq after suffering beatings and interrogations. He died when he was stuffed into a sleeping bag and straddled by Chief Warrant Officer Lewis E. Welshofer Jr. In January 2006, Welshofer was reprimanded for Mowhoush’s death. His son, Mohammed, told the Washington Post that month that U.S. forces first kidnapped him and his three brothers from their home. Mohammed was 15 at that time and claimed he was not an insurgent. “They said if my father does not come [turn himself in] you will never see your family back,” Mohammad told the Post. The article stated that classified documents show the general “later surrendered in an attempt to free his sons.”

The hook for the Salon story was recent developments in the ongoing battle between Congress and the Defense Department for information:

Congress has demanded that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld hand over a raft of documents to Congress that could substantiate allegations that U.S. forces have tried to break terror suspects by kidnapping and mistreating their family members. Rumsfeld has until 5 p.m. Friday to comply. (That was Friday, July 14.)
[…]
A House subcommittee led by Connecticut Republican Christopher Shays took the unusual step last month of issuing Rumsfeld a subpoena for the documents after months of stonewalling by the Pentagon. Shays had requested the documents in a March 7 letter. “There was no response” to the letter, a frustrated Shays told Salon. “We are not going to back off this.”
[…]
Congressional staff said the Department of Defense so far has not adequately responded to the subpoena for documents about Provance or kidnapping at Abu Ghraib. The Pentagon claimed that Shays’ subcommittee already had everything it needed about detainee abuse. “The Department has already provided much of this information to the Congress — mainly to the House Armed Services Committee, a committee of oversight,” Lt. Col. Mark Ballesteros said in an e-mailed statement. “We have delivered to the House Government Reform Committee all of the documents that can be provided and are appropriate to provide.” Ballesteros added that, “Humane treatment is and always has been the Department of Defense standard for the treatment of detainees in its custody.”

Since all else has failed, if Secretary Rumsfeld did not respond to the Friday deadline, Shays’ subcommittee should just subpoena somebody’s wife and children. And subject them to the certifiably humane treatment that the military laid on for, say, Hamid Zabar’s son. And then repeat their request for documents, remembering to say “pretty please” this time. Maybe the “pretty please” will do the trick?