In today’s New York Times, there is an article by Eric Schmitt titled "Pentagon Seeks to Overhaul Prisons in Afghanistan". The article ostensibly is about an ongoing effort to upgrade both facilities and treatment of prisoners in Afghanistan. However, the second paragraph of the article stands out to me:

In a further sign of high-level concern over detention practices, Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, sent a confidential message last week to all of the military service chiefs and senior field commanders asking them to redouble their efforts to alert troops to the importance of treating detainees properly.

Why would Mullen send out such a message, if, as the article points out, there already has been a full analysis of treatment in Afghanistan prisons? A later paragraph has a further clue:

Admiral Mullen felt compelled to issue his message last week after viewing photographs documenting abuse of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan by American military personnel in the early years of the wars there, a senior military official said.

What is the link between early abuses at prisons in Iraq and the potential for ongoing abuses in prisons in Afghanistan? Stanley McChrystal.

Here are some often-quoted passages from an Esquire article on McChrystal’s abuses in Iraq prisons:

Nama, it is said, stood for Nasty Ass Military Area. Jeff says there was a maverick, high-speed feeling to the place. Some of the interrogators had beards and long hair and everyone used only first names, even the officers. "When you ask somebody their name, they don’t offer up the last name," Jeff says. "When they gave you their name it probably wasn’t their real name anyway."

/snip/

It was a point of pride that the Red Cross would never be allowed in the door, Jeff says. This is important because it defied the Geneva Conventions, which require that the Red Cross have access to military prisons. "Once, somebody brought it up with the colonel. ‘Will they ever be allowed in here?’ And he said absolutely not. He had this directly from General McChrystal and the Pentagon that there’s no way that the Red Cross could get in — they won’t have access and they never will. This facility was completely closed off to anybody investigating, even Army investigators."

/snip/

To Garlasco, this is significant. This means that a full-bird colonel and all his support staff knew exactly what was going on at Camp Nama. "Do you know where the colonel was getting his orders from?" he asks.

Jeff answers quickly, perhaps a little defiantly. "I believe it was a two-star general. I believe his name was General McChrystal. I saw him there a couple of times."

Many of the worst abuses in prisons in Iraq can be traced to Stanley McChrystal. McChrystal also went on to head the Joint Special Operations Command that is "credited" with decreasing the violence in Iraq in 2007. From the Washington Post whorunsgov website:

From September 2003 through August 2008, McChrystal served as commander of the super-secret Joint Special Operations Command/Joint Special Operations Command Forward. McChrystal led the charge to nab several high-profile U.S. foes in Iraq, including Saddam Hussein in December 2003 and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al Qaeda in Iraq, in June 2006. In August 2008, Mullen made him director of the Joint Staff at the Pentagon.

But his elite troops were criticized in various media reports for employing harsh interrogation tactics as part of Task Force 6-26, a group of top secret commandos who questioned terrorist suspects at Camp Nama located at Baghdad International Airport. There are allegations that the unit’s commanders didn’t do enough to stop and punish abusive questioning techniques.

Note also that when the New York Times endorsed McChrystal to be the overall commander in Afghanistan, they acknowledged that he would increase the number of prisoners there:

Reducing that toll will require tighter and more strictly enforced rules of engagement. That applies not just to airstrikes but to the search and detention operations that General McChrystal wants to expand this year with the help of 21,000 additional troops that President Obama ordered sent to Afghanistan. Ground operations are less likely to go astray than airstrikes. But as happened far too many times in Iraq, they can sweep up innocent civilians and turn local people against the American presence.

In the context of McChrystal’s history of indiscriminate detentions and torture, Mullen’s message last week sure looks like an attempt to distance himself from the abuses which are sure to come.