corrente

What's the criterion? Set up the torture system, while avoiding scrutiny. It's the "avoiding scrutiny" part that's really important; since the WhiteWash House is continually inventing cover stories to cover its crimes, old and new, a proven track record for avoiding accountability is key.

From the Baltimore Sun:

Among the handful of Army officers facing scrutiny in the investigation of abuses at Abu Ghraib prison, Maj. Gen. Barbara Fast is perhaps the least known, but among the most important.

Fast, 50, the senior intelligence officer in Iraq, was the key conduit for orders and information...

Conduit, eh? We know where the information was coming from; but where was it going to? And was there a channel into the WhiteWash House? Of course there was!

...that related to Abu Ghraib, which she visited frequently, including the infamous cellblocks 1A and 1B, where abuses took place.

A civilian interrogator at the prison wrote that she was involved in CIA access, and Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, who was the overall commander of military police at the facility, said Fast was aware of a Red Cross report revealing wrongdoing at the prison three months before the scandal broke.

[Fast also installed Pappas and Jordan, who were singled out in the Taguba report, and who ] have been reprimanded. Fast, whose career has ascended rapidly, has been given a plum assignment when she leaves Iraq next month: commander of the Army's intelligence center and school at Fort Huachuca, Ariz., where she served a brief tour as assistant commandant.

Well. Apparently the administration considers Abu Ghraib such a success—maybe they do have OBL on ice?—that Fast is going to teach the techniques developed there to others.

"It's very strange. [Fast] was never suspended. And she [will take] command of Fort Huachuca," said Karpinski, who was commander of the 800th Military Police Brigade until she received a letter of admonishment for her alleged leadership failures and was suspended from command. She is trying to get reinstated to her post.

Fast was aware of at least some of the Abu Ghraib activities of CIA personnel, a number of whom are being questioned about the abuses and at least one death, according to the writings of a civilian interrogator at Abu Ghraib, Joe Ryan, who worked for the Virginia-based contractor CACI International.

In a Web diary that is part of a court exhibit filed by Iraqis who claim they were abused at the prison, [Joe] Ryan wrote: "The CIA has proven once again they are incompetent boobs. ... They have General Fast's ire. They cannot set foot on Abu Ghurayb without her expressed permission."

Fast arrived in Baghdad late last summer to become intelligence chief for the top U.S. commander in Iraq, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez. How she ran intelligence operations is among the questions of an Army investigation led by Lt. Gen. Anthony R. Jones, whose equivalent rank allows him to question Sanchez.
(via Baltimore Sun)

So Fast was the "conduit," eh? So did "our" government's video of the shrieking boys being raped pass through her hands? And, if so, who did she pass it to?

Follow the bytes!

NOTE The A1 Project has more on Barbara Fast.