corrente

Go USA Today!

The officer who oversaw interrogations at Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad testified that he was under intense ''pressure'' from the White House, Pentagon and CIA last fall to get better information from detainees, pressure that he said included a visit to the prison by an aide to national security adviser Condoleezza Rice.

Army Lt. Col. Steven Jordan, in a sworn statement to Army investigators obtained by USA TODAY, said he was told last September that White House staffers wanted to ''pull the intelligence out'' of the interrogations being conducted at Abu Ghraib. The pressure stemmed from growing concern about the increasingly violent Iraqi insurgency that was claiming American lives daily. It came before and during a string of abuses of Iraqi prisoners in October, November and December of 2003.

While the documents obtained by USA TODAY do not answer questions about how high approval of the abuses went...

That's because The Fog Machine was designed to provide Bush with "plausible deniability" and shield Him from responsibility.

... they show there was intense interest in the Abu Ghraib operations at the highest levels of the Pentagon and the White House staff.

How much the White House knew -- or wanted to know -- about the interrogation techniques being used at Abu Ghraib remains unclear. The documents reveal no explicit approval by Bush administration officials of harsh treatment.

Just like His Dad. "Not in the loop." Ha, right.

UPDATE Digby has a nice post on how the "pressure" from the WhiteWash House led to a numbers game. Heck, you can't manage what you don't measure, and what better metric for a prison than, say, the number of interrogations? Sounds just like the ol' "body count" in Viet Nam, to me. Do we never learn?