File this under 'D' for Duh!

The WaPo reports -- Abu Ghraib Dog Tactics Came From Guantanamo:

Military interrogators at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq learned about the use of military working dogs to intimidate detainees from a team of interrogators dispatched from the U.S. detention facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, according to court testimony yesterday.

One interrogation analyst also testified that sleep deprivation and forced nudity -- which were used in Cuba on high-value detainees -- later were approved tactics at Abu Ghraib. Another soldier said that interrogators would regularly pass instructions to have dog handlers and military police "scare up" detainees as part of interrogation plans, part of an approved approach that relied on exploiting the fear of dogs.

No sh*t! Limited to a few low-level miscreant MPs my a**. This goes all the way to the Vice President, Dick Cheney.

Several Republican senators are pushing legislation -- opposed by the White House -- that would regulate the treatment of detainees at Guantanamo and other military prisons. One of them, Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), released recently declassified internal memos written in 2003 by the military's top lawyers in which they warned the Pentagon about developing severe tactics, arguing that they would heighten danger for U.S. troops caught by the enemy, among other problems.

Note that it was Darth that went to the Senate to dissuade the maverick Republican Senators McCain and company from attaching the legislation to the military appropriations bill with a threatened veto. How anyone with as little as a kindergarden education not see the connection? Read the whole piece. On the one hand, we have the administration claiming ignorance and innocence... we don't condone torture, yet on the other, we see clearly that the acts uncovered by the release of the Abu Ghraib images (and again, only a select few, since the administration is now fighting against an FOIA claim that they all be released) were deliberate, and directed from high in the administration. It was no accident that the tactics employed were the same in Abu Ghraib and Gitmo (and elsewhere).