Leadership Quote by Marty Meehan

“Regrettably” does a lot of work here: it’s the soft glove over a hard accusation. Meehan isn’t just lamenting bad optics after Abu Ghraib; he’s widening the frame from a single scandal to a systemic pattern. The sentence structure moves like a prosecutor’s brief. First, he concedes what the public already knows (Abu Ghraib), then pivots to what the public would rather treat as unthinkable: the abuse is “not limited” by location, unit, or even war zone. That phrasing quietly indicts the comforting narrative that a few “bad apples” in Iraq tainted an otherwise clean mission.

The key rhetorical move is scale. “United States custody” is expansive by design, pulling in black sites, military prisons, intelligence holding facilities, and the gray space where accountability gets intentionally blurred. By naming Iraq and then pushing past it, he signals that the story is not about one prison’s chaos but about policy drift, permissive command climates, and oversight that arrived late or performed as theater.

The second sentence tightens the vise: “Since Abu Ghraib” marks a before-and-after moral rupture, as if the country crossed a line and then kept walking. “Increasing reports” is politically careful - he avoids claiming omniscient proof - but it still implies a mounting evidentiary record that officials can’t plausibly dismiss. The intent is pressure: to make denial look naive, and minimization look complicit, at a moment when American legitimacy abroad and rule-of-law credibility at home were both on trial.