Not So Fast, General

Salon.com

A bipartisan call by senators to halt the retirement of the major general at the heart of the Abu Ghraib scandal suggests the abuse inquiry finally has a pulse.

By Mark Benjamin

Mar. 07, 2006 Geoffrey Miller, the major general at the center of the Abu Ghraib prison-abuse scandal, decided in January that he intended to retire after more than three decades in the Army. At the same time, Miller took the rare step of stating he intended to invoke the military equivalent of the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination in the court-martial proceedings of two dog handlers from the notorious Iraqi prison. One court-martial starts next week and the other in May.

But Miller's retirement plans have been put on hold due to a joint letter sent to the Army by Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John Warner, R-Va., and Carl Levin, D-Mich., the senior Democrat on the panel. Salon has learned that on Feb. 23 the two senators wrote Secretary of the Army Francis Harvey asking that Miller's retirement "be held in abeyance" until these two court-martial proceedings are completed.

The bipartisan Warner-Levin letter signals that Congress' anemic probe of abuse at Abu Ghraib might have a pulse after all. The topic has sparked little formal inquiry since an initial round of hearings were held during the spring of 2004, shortly after news accounts of the mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners aroused a public outcry. Miller, who had come to Iraq to help set up Abu Ghraib in late summer 2003 on a visit from running the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, last testified before Congress on the matter in May 2004.

More: http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2006/03/07/major_general/