May 3, 2004" - Richard B. Myers wears the stars. He is the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of America’s armed forces. Colin Powell held the job during the first Iraqi War under Old 41, President George H. W. Bush. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs is supposed to know. That is why he was hired. Yesterday he was asked to assure the public that the abuses of prisoners revealed by CBS news were not indicative of a wider pattern of prisoner abuse. “We don’t know that yet, “Myers answered.

Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba caught the job of investigating the claims of a couple US soldiers who spoke out about abuses at Abu Ghraib prison between October and December of last year and supported their accounts with copies of photographs. He completed his report last February. In it he pinned the blame for the abuses on two military intelligence officers and two employees of CACI International. Yesterday Gen. Myers admitted that he had not yet read Taguba’s 53 page classified report. Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld hadn’t read it either. Readers of The New Yorker got a glimpse of what is in the report yesterday when Seymour Hersh’s article hit the magazine’s website. http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?040510fa_fact

CACI International is a civilian contracting firm with headquarters in Arlington, Virginia. It works for the Defense Department. On April 21, 2004 CACI issued a news release trumpeting record earnings in its third quarter. According to the company its third quarter revenue was 288 million dollars bringing the figure taken in during the last twelve months to more than $1 Billion. All in all the press release promised investors that the firm had a rosy future. Privatizing war had been good to the company. The company website strongly supports the Bush Administration and its conduct of the Second Iraqi War.

Col. Thomas M. Pappas commanded the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade in charge of Abu Ghraib’s Tier 1 when the abuses took place. Lt. Col. Steven L. Jordan was the liaison officer to the Brigade from the Joint Interrogation and Debriefing Center and its former director. Steven Stephanowicz and John Israel are civilians, employees of CACI and were under contract to the Army to be the primary interrogators assigned to Tier 1. The Taguba Report identifies these four men as "either directly or indirectly responsible for the abuses at Abu Ghraib.” The highest ranking soldier facing charges is a Master Sergeant. Neither General Myers nor Secretary Rumsfeld has seen the 53 page classified report. For that matter you can be sure that it has not reached the Presidents desk. The Buck doesn’t stop there any more.

“There are some things that we know. There are some things that we know that we don’t know and there are some things that we don’t know that we don’t know,” Secretary Rumsfeld said not long ago describing the intelligence efforts in Iraq. What he left unsaid was that there are some things that we don’t want to know and make every effort to avoid knowing. Is Tier One at Abu Ghraib part of a wider pattern stretching from Cuba to Afghanistan and points in between? We don’t know that yet but CACI does.