Tony Taguba knew something about prisoners in wartime long before the Pentagon ordered him to investigate the torture and shameful mistreatment of Iraqi detainees revealed by those soldier photographs taken inside Abu Ghraib prison.
You see, his father, Sgt. Tomas Taguba, was a soldier in the famed Philippine Scouts and was, briefly, a prisoner of the Japanese after Bataan fell in the opening days of our war in the Pacific. Sgt. Taguba escaped during the Death March and spent the next three years spying on the Japanese and relaying the information to U.S. forces.
After the war, the senior Taguba was allowed to enlist in the U.S. Army and served honorably and unsung until his retirement. His son was born in Manila in 1950 but grew up as American as apple pie, earned an ROTC commission at Idaho State University and was only the second Filipino-American to attain the rank of general in our Army.
Maj. Gen. Anthony Taguba would undergo his own trial by fire when, in 2004, he was named by the Pentagon to conduct a carefully walled-in investigation of the abuses of prisoners at Abu Ghraib.
By regulation — and no doubt by the design of those who appointed him — Taguba could not investigate any uniformed or civilian official whose rank was higher than his own two stars.
Taguba and his investigators sifted and probed and assessed the blame as high as they were permitted to go. Taguba believed — no, he KNEW — that the responsibility for this outrage went much higher. He knew it reached to the office of then Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and likely beyond to the lawyers who served President George W. Bush and perhaps even to the president himself.
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