The "Black Room"

The NY Times has fleshed out some more details on "Task Force 6-26," an "elite Special Operations forces unit" that trapsed around Iraq rounding up people in a vain search for the mythical Zarqawi beginning in early 2004. Once captured, the detainees would be taken back to one of Saddam Hussein's old military bases -- which the Americans converted into a camp -- where they'd be typically beaten, humiliated, and tortured. We learn that the Americans even "used detainees for target practice in a game of jailer paintball," according to the Times' account. Much of the worst stuff, mind you, happened after the initial Abu Ghraib revelations.

While this is the first major, substantive article on the Task Force, which has been floating around in news stories and DoD memos for a few years, the story unearthed is really an old, familiar one: in a desperate attempt to get intelligence on the insurgency in Iraq, the US military authorized -- and indeed facilitated -- abusive actions, black bag ops, torture, and, generally speaking, mini Gestapos to go around terrorizing anybody who might -- just might -- have some knowledge of the insurgency.

That many of the same tactics of "intelligence gathering" migrated from Gitmo to Abu Ghraib to Bagram, and now to this shadowy base at Camp Nama, should make it glaringly obvious (as if it weren't already) that all of the torture and abuse the Americans have committed during its "war on terror" are a direct consequence of policy, reaching to the highest levels of the Pentagon and White House. Put that "Bad Apples" defense on ice, for good.