Washington Post concludes detainee abuse 'widespread'

A Washington Post article has summed up a lot of the information coming from the 9,000 pages released to the public about the detainee abuse scandal. They draw some important conclusions: the abuse took place over three years, that punishments were light for most offenders, and that the investigations were often not as thorough as seemed appropriate.

In many of the newly disclosed cases, Army commanders chose noncriminal punishments for those involved in the abuse, or the investigations were so flawed that prosecutions could not go forward, the documents show. Human rights groups said yesterday that, as a result, the penalties imposed were too light to suit the offenses.[...]

The variety of the abuse and the fact that it occurred over a three-year period undermine the Pentagon's past insistence -- arising out of the summertime scandal surrounding the mistreatment at Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison -- that the abuse occurred largely during a few months at that prison, and that it mostly involved detainee humiliation or intimidation rather than the deliberate infliction of pain.