So maybe they were right

Those teachers with their scare tactics when I was a kid in elementary school. Their threat was always that we had to be on our guard fighting communism, an evil trying to take over our country and so insidious that, if we were not vigilant, we would go to sleep one night and wake up the next day communists.

Sid Blumenthal Gets It

It's about a lot more than a few depraved MPs:

Bush has created what is in effect a gulag. It stretches from prisons in Afghanistan to Iraq, from Guantánamo to secret CIA prisons around the world. There are perhaps 10,000 people being held in Iraq, 1,000 in Afghanistan and almost 700 in Guantánamo, but no one knows the exact numbers. The law as it applies to them is whatever the executive deems necessary.

There has been nothing like this system since the fall of the Soviet Union. The US military embraced the Geneva conventions after the second world war, because applying them to prisoners of war protects American soldiers. But the Bush administration, in an internal fight, trumped its argument by designating those at Guantánamo "enemy combatants". Rumsfeld extended this system - "a legal black hole", according to Human Rights Watch - to Afghanistan and then Iraq, openly rejecting the conventions.

Sid Blumenthal, via Billmon.

He also gives a few crumbs of information on the cover up, which appears to still be in progress:

Many [Senators], Democratic and Republican, were infuriated that there was no accountability and no punishment and demanded a special investigation, but the Republican leadership quashed it. The senators want Rumsfeld to testify in a public hearing, but he is resisting and the Republican leaders are blocking it.

The Bush administration was well aware of the Taguba report, but more concerned about its exposure than its contents. General Richard Myers, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, was dispatched on a mission to CBS news to tell it to suppress its story and the horrifying pictures...

I'm not sure the mainstream media, much less the American public, can absorb much more than they already have. It's not easy to admit you live in a country that now owns and operates its own system of gulag camps - instead of contracting the entire job out to friendly despots, sight unseen, as in the good old days.

In other words, the administration has the public's desire not to know on its side.

Billmon "gets it".