And speaking of stories that are probably being covered everywhere but here, apparently Sy Hersh’s new book has even more revelations about Iraqi prisoner abuse :

The investigation, by the veteran journalist Seymour Hersh, quotes one former marine at the camp recalling sessions in which guards would “fuck with [detainees] as much as we could” by inflicting pain on them.

The Bush administration repeatedly assured critics that inmates were granted recreation periods, but one Pentagon adviser told Hersh how, for some prisoners, they consisted of being left in straitjackets in intense sunlight with hoods over their heads.

Hersh provides details of how President George Bush signed off on the establishment of a secret unit that was given advance approval to kill or capture and interrogate “high-value” suspects – considered by many to be in defiance of international law – an officially “unacknowledged” programme that was eventually transferred wholesale from Guant?namo to the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
. . .
A CIA analyst visited Guant?namo in summer 2002 and returned “convinced that we were committing war crimes” and that “more than half the people there didn’t belong there. He found people lying in their own faeces,” a CIA source told Hersh.
. . .
A senior intelligence official told Hersh: “I was told [by FBI agents] that the military guards were slapping prisoners, stripping them, pouring cold water over them and making them stand until they got hypothermia.”

The secret “special access programme” facilitating much of the mistreatment of prisoners, widely held to have contravened the Geneva convention, was established following a direct order from the president.

Hersh reports that a secret document signed by Mr Bush in February 2002 stated: “I determine that none of the provisions of Geneva apply to our conflict with al-Qaida in Afghanistan or elsewhere throughout the world.”

Perhaps that’s one the the reasons that the Bushies insist that the Iraq war has something to do with al Qaeda. As long as they keep pretending they’re going after those responsible for 9/11, they can trot out their argument that “the old rules” of war no longer apply.