Pete Hegseth Offered Defense of Abu Ghraib, Attacked Media Coverage of Torture Prison
In a 2007 interview on C-SPAN, Pete Hegseth, the former Army National Guard officer and Fox News host nominated to become Trump's Secretary of Defense, offered a defense of the United States’ actions at Abu Ghraib prison while dismissing the incident as an "absolute exception" to military conduct during the Iraq War. Although he labeled the abuses—a horrific episode involving the torture and humiliation of prisoners—as “a shame” and “a problem,” Hegseth downplayed their significance, criticizing the media for covering the story extensively.
In 2003, United States military and intelligence personal at Abu Ghraib prison, which held up to 7,000 prisoners, conducted "acts of brutality and purposeless sadism" according to "the executive summary of the final report of the Independent Panel to Review Department of Defense Detention Operations" published by The New York Times. Photos of the abuse, which will not be published here, show military personnel sitting on top of naked prisoners, naked prisoners stacked on top of each other, prisoners on leashes, prisoners tied to their beds, prisoners with hoods over their heads, in other words, in varying forms of torture.
Personnel could be seen smiling and giving a thumbs up sign over the tortured prisoners.
Far from an exception as Hegseth claimed, the independent panel stated that 300 allegations of abuse took place across Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo Bay, with 155 of those being investigated and 66 of those being substantiated. This wasn't a "absolute exception" as Hegseth stated.
https://meidasnews.com/news/pete-hegseth-offered-defense-of-abu-ghraib-attacked-media-coverage-of-torture-prison
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Pos!
