Tony Taguba and the Truth About Abu Ghraib
June 29, 2007
The week after boldly ending his silence on Abu Ghraib in a New Yorker interview, Antonio Taguba was in San Francisco last Sunday, dressed casually in an open-neck shirt and blue jeans, overshadowed by the New York Yankees and the Gay Pride Parade.
He was just another Asian American of Filipino descent in the neighborhood.
“I’m just a private citizen,” he said with a modest smile.
Taguba looked nothing like the retired two-star general whom history is likely to remember as one of the “good guys” of the Iraq War, a moral face amid an immoral war.
It was Taguba who was asked in January 2004 to investigate the military’s abuse and torture of Iraqis at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison. Even though he was prevented from finding out who was responsible for the abuses, Taguba delivered a devastating report in March 2004, complete with graphic photographs and lurid details.
It was an investigation that was done so well the Army went into denial.
In May, two months after a report was delivered, then Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld testified to Congress as if he knew nothing about the event and its dehumanizing pictures. Now we know that isn’t true.
But Rumsfeld’s denial is so typical of our government these days, with the truth being variable.
That’s tough when you’re a career soldier like Taguba, for whom values like truth and honesty still have an absolute meaning.
The New Yorker piece by Seymour Hersh showed that the Army knew months earlier about the severe violations at Abu Ghraib. Taguba also revealed there are more unpublished photographs, including a uniformed American sodomizing a female. And he said it’s likely the evasiveness of Rumsfeld and others was due to fear of exposing the extent of the CIA’s involvement in covert intelligence activity.
All bad.
But nothing quite like the personal tragedy of Taguba, the son of a Filipino WWII Bataan Death March survivor, who rose from humble origins to become a two-star general, but then fell hard for taking his job as a truth-teller too seriously.
For his excessive truth, Taguba was essentially fired, told by the Army in 2006 to retire within the year.
He did so dutifully, but sadly.
FORCED OUT
“Nobody wants to retire or leave the force when we are at war,” Taguba told me at a gathering of Filipino WWII veterans in San Francisco. “There are kids out there. Kids who made me look famous. Kids who contributed to my success. Why would I want to leave all of a sudden?”
I asked him if the abrupt end to 35 years in the military hurts him deeply.
“Oh yeah,” he said in a soft voice. “Personally, I feel I could have stayed longer. But when your time is up and someone tells you to retire, you salute the flag and you retire.”
Again, said like a good soldier, without a hint of regret.
And yet he is troubled by how his investigation caused his departure.
“I want people to understand that I did it for a reason,” he said to me. “And the reason is that something else is not happening: senior leaders in government today aren’t holding themselves accountable. … Why is it that only a dozen soldiers are in jail today [for Abu Ghraib]?”
He said he never wavered in his mission, despite hints from others who showed displeasure by his zeal for truth.
“When somebody tells you to do something and you don’t do it right, your integrity is questioned,” Taguba told me. “How would you like it if your integrity is questioned? Can you live with it? Anytime you do something, you have to do it factually and truthfully.”
He asked two rhetorical questions: “Why is integrity and truth a crime today? Why is a whistleblower treated like a criminal?”
Answering those questions isn’t easy. He admitted to not being a political animal, and talked about how politics had changed the military since the Bush Administration.
“I don’t think the president is well-served,” said Taguba, who believes that the commander-in-chief has delegated too many decisions to high-powered subordinates.
He just can’t imagine any of this happening in the military of 10 or 15 years ago. The selfless values of the good soldier are passé. Taguba has seen it degenerate to the point where he likens the military to the Mafia.
“We went from shock and awe to chaos and unpredictability,” Taguba said.
“I AM NOT A HERO”
Friends of Taguba’s like Rudy Asercion of the Veterans War Memorial Commission of San Francisco feel it’s time for the community to rally behind a real hero, and even to demand the government to apologize for how it treated the general.
But Taguba wants no part of that, neither the hero talk nor the apology stuff.
“I am not a hero,” Taguba said. “And I don’t need for the government to apologize to me. I would prefer that the leaders apologize to the American people.”
“An open declaration that they were not truthful or candid with respect to what happened at Abu Ghraib and to where we are today in Iraq,” he said.
“I don’t go around telling people to feel sorry for me,” Taguba added. “Feel sorry for the 3,500 troops who are dead today. Feel sorry because our prestige has been denigrated. Feel sorry because our image has been tarnished.”
——-
Reach Emil Guillermo at emil@amok.com
Comments
2 Responses to “Tony Taguba and the Truth About Abu Ghraib”
Got something to say?
[…] of the Neo-Cons Retired Major General Antonio Taguba is now a very hated non-white (“Emil Amok: Tony Taguba and the Truth About Abu Ghraib,” June 29) to the fanatic and frustrated neo-cons and over-zealous religious extremists for […]
Such tortures are abated, thanks to a true A
merican : A.M. Taguba.
However, massive corruption in America will marginalize him. The public will forget his name. But, I never will forget Major General A. M. Taguba. I will remind the public whenever I can.
Tortures, like the most hideous oppressions, have been alive in recent decades. Indeed, I was routinely framed repeatedly. I am now no longer a cop pursuing the actual organized crime in America (a multi-trillion dollar fatal illness) : I am erased, and forgotten. See, my posting: http://www.myspace.com/frederick_alexander_jones. Visit : You will certainly learn from the view in the trenches.