[Mb-civic] NYTimes.com Article: Holding the Pentagon Accountable: For Abu Ghraib

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Holding the Pentagon Accountable: For Abu Ghraib

August 26, 2004
 


 

For anyone with the time to wade through 400-plus pages and
the resources to decode them, the two reports issued this
week on the Abu Ghraib prison are an indictment of the way
the Bush administration set the stage for Iraqi prisoners
to be brutalized by American prison guards, military
intelligence officers and private contractors. 

The Army's internal investigation, released yesterday,
showed that the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib went far
beyond the actions of a few sadistic military police
officers - the administration's chosen culprits. It said
that 27 military intelligence soldiers and civilian
contractors committed criminal offenses, and that military
officials hid prisoners from the Red Cross. Another report,
from a civilian panel picked by Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld, offers the dedicated reader a dotted line from
President Bush's decision to declare Iraq a front in the
war against terror, to government lawyers finding ways to
circumvent the Geneva Conventions, to Mr. Rumsfeld's
bungled planning of the occupation and understaffing of the
ground forces in Iraq, to the hideous events at Abu Ghraib
prison. 

That was a service to the public, but the civilian panel
did an enormous disservice by not connecting those dots and
walking away from any real exercise in accountability.
Instead, Pentagon officials who are never named get muted
criticism for issuing confusing memos and not monitoring
things closely enough. This is all cast as "leadership
failure" - the 21st-century version of the Nixonian
"mistakes were made" evasion - that does not require even
the mildest reprimand for Mr. Rumsfeld, who should have
resigned over this disaster months ago. Direct condemnation
is reserved for the men and women in the field, from the
military police officers sent to guard prisoners without
training to the three-star general in Iraq. 

Still, the dots are there, making it clear that the road to
Abu Ghraib began well before the invasion of Iraq, when the
administration created the category of "unlawful
combatants" for suspected members of Al Qaeda and the
Taliban who were captured in Afghanistan and imprisoned in
Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Interrogators wanted to force these
prisoners to talk in ways that are barred by American law
and the Geneva Conventions, and on Aug. 1, 2002, Justice
Department lawyers produced the infamous treatise on how to
construe torture as being legal. 

In December 2002, Mr. Rumsfeld authorized things like
hooding prisoners, using dogs to terrify them, forcing them
into "stress positions" for long periods, stripping them,
shaving them and isolating them. All this was prohibited by
the Geneva Conventions, but President Bush had already
declared on Feb. 7, 2002, that the Geneva Conventions did
not apply to Al Qaeda. 

In January, the general counsel of the Navy objected, and
Mr. Rumsfeld rescinded some of the extreme techniques. Then
another legal review further narrowed the list, and Mr.
Rumsfeld issued yet another memo on April 16, 2003. The
Schlesinger panel said the memos confused field commanders,
who thought that harsh interrogations were allowed, and
that things could have been made clearer if Mr. Rumsfeld
had allowed a real legal debate in the first place. Yet the
panel places no fault on Mr. Rumsfeld for the cascade of
disastrous events that followed. 

According to the report, American forces began mistreating
prisoners at the outset of the war in Afghanistan.
Interrogators and members of military intelligence were
sent from Afghanistan to Iraq, and the harsh interrogations
"migrated" with them, the report said. But one of the
panel's oddest failures is how it deals with this issue. It
notes that Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, who had been running
the prison in Guantánamo Bay, went to Iraq in August 2003,
bringing the harsh interrogation rules with him. The report
said Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the commander in Iraq, used
his advice to approve a dozen "aggressive interrogation
techniques," and that General Sanchez was "using reasoning"
from the president's own memo. But in the strange logic of
this report, that was not the fault of those who made the
policies. The report assigns no responsibility to General
Miller, nor does it say that he was sent to Iraq by Mr.
Rumsfeld's staff. 

All these decisions were happening in a chaotic context.
The Schlesinger reports said the military failed to
anticipate the insurgency in Iraq or react to it properly
and was unprepared for the number of prisoners it had.
Insufficient numbers of military police units were sent to
Iraq in a disorganized fashion, many of them untrained
reservists. 

The panel was right in criticizing General Sanchez for not
appreciating the scope of the disaster, but it made only
the most glancing reference to the bigger problem: the
Iraqi occupation force was too small. And that was a policy
approved by Mr. Bush and designed by Mr. Rumsfeld, who
wanted a lightning invasion by the sparest force possible,
based on the ludicrous notion that Iraqis would not resist.


Still, the civilian panel said the politicians had only
indirect responsibility for this mess, and Mr. Schlesinger
made the absurd argument that firing Mr. Rumsfeld would aid
"the enemy." That is reminiscent of the comment Mr. Bush
made last spring when he visited the Pentagon to view
images of American soldiers torturing Iraqi prisoners and
then announced that Mr. Rumsfeld was doing a "superb job."
It may not be all that surprising from a commission
appointed by the secretary of defense and run by two former
secretaries of defense (Mr. Schlesinger and Harold Brown).
But it seems less a rational assessment than an attempt to
cut off any further criticism of the men at the top. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/26/opinion/26thurs1.html?ex=1094543777&ei=1&en=ae5c84b5bf244eba


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