Army Major General Taguba Saw Video of Male Soldier Sodomizing Female Detainee

By GottaLaff

UPDATE: Taguba denies he's seen abuse photos suppressed by Obama
But what about video?

Original post:

Again, this is becoming a hotter and hotter topic, as I knew it would be when I posted about some unreleased photos the other day. Also, a post about some others/same (?) here. More of my follow-up posts here and here. It's getting confusing, is it not?

Now, some clarification via Jason Leopold:

In 2007, shortly after he was forced into retirement, Army Major General Antonio M. Taguba, made a startling admission. During the course of his investigation into the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib Taguba said he saw “a video of a male American soldier in uniform sodomizing a female detainee.”

Taguba told New Yorker reporter Seymour Hersh that he saw other graphic photos and videos as well, including one depicting the “sexual humiliation of a father with his son, who were both detainees.”

That video as well as photographs Taguba saw of U.S. soldiers raping and torturing Iraqi prisoners, remains in the possession of the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division (CID).

Taguba said he did not discuss the details of the more graphic photographs and videos he saw in his voluminous report on the abuses at Abu Ghraib because of the Army’s ongoing criminal probe and the photographs’ “extremely sensitive nature.”

Taguba's report on the widespread of abuse of prisoners did say that he found credible a report that a soldier had sodomized “a detainee with a chemical light and perhaps a broom stick.” [...]

But the photographs described by the Telegraph are not the ones that were at the center of the five-year-old lawsuit between the Bush administration and the ACLU that Obama had agreed earlier this year to release.

Two weeks ago, after Obama decided against releasing the photographs, the Telegraph published a story along with several pictures depicting Iraqi prisoners being abused claiming those too were the ones Obama was withholding. But that report was also incorrect as the photographs the Telegraph published had first surfaced in 2006. The newspaper has since changed the headline and first paragraph of its report.

The photographs Obama has decided to withhold, as I first reported May 15, are ones that were taken in 2003 and 2004 in which U.S. Army soldiers in Afghanistan took dozens of pictures of their colleagues pointing assault rifles and pistols at the heads and backs of hooded and bound detainees.

Another photograph, found on a government computer, showed two male soldiers and one female soldier pointing a broom to one detainee “as if I was sticking the end of a broom stick into [his] rectum,” according to the female soldier’s account as told to an Army criminal investigator.

I found the documents that describes many of the photographs that were set for release this month on the ACLU’s website. [...] Those files can be downloaded here: [Part 1] [Part 2] [Part 3] [Part 4] [Part 5].

Amrit Singh, an ACLU staff attorney, confirmed that the photographs described in documents posted on the group's website were those that President Obama has decided to withhold fearing the disclosure would stoke anti-American sentiment and endanger U.S. troops.

That does not mean the photographs and videos described by Taguba do not exist, as Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman and White House press secretary Robert Gibbs seemed to suggest in response to the Telegraph’s report Thursday, which was also harshly critical of the British press in general. It's just not the photographs in question.

Leopold has more details here.

H/t: The Joshua Blog