Major-General Antonio Taguba, who was forced to “retire” in January of 2007 after 34 years of service, has said that leading military officials and the president himself knew about the human rights violations being carried out at the Abu Ghraib prison before it became public. Taguba also said former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and the military officials who stood with him, had failed the country.

Taguba spoke of other, undisclosed material, such as the sexual humiliation of a father with his son and “a video of a male American soldier in uniform sodomizing a female detainee” that was never made public or even mentioned in any court.

Seymour Hersh, who interviewed Taguba for the New Yorker, told Al Jazeera that Taguba had been warned by General John Abizaid, the then commander of the US Central Command, that he would be investigated along with his report.

“I’d been in the army 32 years by then, and it was the first time that I thought I was in the Mafia,” Taguba said.

Taguba was told to retire by January 2007 and was offered no reason.

He said he was “ostracised for doing what I was asked to do”.

Well aware that his former military colleagues would be angry at his speaking out, the retired general said: “The fact is � we violated the tenets of the Geneva Convention. We violated our own principles and we violated the core of our military values. “The stress of combat is not an excuse, and I believe, even today, that those civilian and military leaders responsible should be held accountable.

Taguba said that all high-level officials involved in the Abu Ghraib scandal had gotten off, while their subordinates were court-martial. “From what I knew, troops just don’t take it upon themselves to initiate what they did without any form of knowledge of the higher-ups.” Taguba continued, “These [military police] troops were not that creative. Somebody was giving them guidance, but I was legally prevented from further investigation into higher authority.”

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