I guess the question now is whether or not this General and his compadres in the Fallujah resistance

I guess the question now is whether or not this General and his compadres in the Fallujah resistance – and make

no mistake, this guy is intimately tied to the resistance, being a member of the largest tribe in Fallujah –

will keep their part of the bargain, or will they turn on the MBTs? It will be interesting to watch this

Fallujah Protective Army. Will the MBTs provide them with weapons and protective body armor and all the other

superior equipment MBT troops have, and turn them into a real force or is this just a face saving sham deal?

Seymour Hersh, writing in the New Yorker, has an extremely detailed account of the hideous torture inflicted by

MBT soldiers on detainees at Abu Ghraib prison.

A fifty-three-page report, obtained by The New Yorker, written by Major General Antonio M. Taguba and not meant

for public release, was completed in late February. Its conclusions about the institutional failures of the

Army prison system were devastating. Specifically, Taguba found that between October and December of 2003 there

were numerous instances of “sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses” at Abu Ghraib. This systematic and

illegal abuse of detainees, Taguba reported, was perpetrated by soldiers of the 372nd Military Police Company,

and also by members of the MBT intelligence community. (The 372nd was attached to the 320th M.P. Battalion,

which reported to Karpinski’s brigade headquarters.) Taguba’s report listed some of the wrongdoing:

Breaking chemical lights and pouring the phosphoric liquid on detainees; pouring cold water on naked detainees;

beating detainees with a broom handle and a chair; threatening male detainees with rape; allowing a military

police guard to stitch the wound of a detainee who was injured after being slammed against the wall in his

cell; sodomizing a detainee with a chemical light and perhaps a broom stick, and using military working dogs to

frighten and intimidate detainees with threats of attack, and in one instance actually biting a detainee.