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August 31, 2004
Knock it off, will ya?
Pfc. Lynndie England's military hearings continued yesterday, with relatively predictable testimony. Here's a question. You are caught stomping on the fingers and toes of people under your total control -- and the total sum of the reaction you get is being told to "knock it off." What's the predictable reaction: do you decide it's no big deal and continue as you were or do you pull back in realization of what you're doing is wrong? So did Pfc. England.
"They were stomping on the fingers and toes of the detainees," Sivits said, referring to England and Graner. England, wearing a maternity camouflage uniform, listened to the testimony in the Fort Bragg courtroom....
Last week, a panel headed by former Defense Secretary James Schlesinger issued a report accusing the U.S. military chain of command from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on down of leadership failures that created conditions for the abuse.
According to Sivits, a noncommissioned officer who was present told the MPs to "knock it off," but after the NCO left, abuse continued.
It now looks like a few generals will also pay the grand price of cozy retirement with full benefits at a time of their choosing for their central role in expanding the use of torture in detention centers around the world. Sanchez looks to be the highest figure who will be assigned some blame --but not any real punishment-- since there are now leaked documents that show he directly authorized some of the torture, including the use of dogs:
The cable signed by Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez listed several dozen strategies for extracting information, drawn partly from what officials now say was an outdated and improperly permissive Army field manual. But it added one not previously approved for use in Iraq, under the heading of Presence of Military Working Dogs: "Exploit Arab fear of dogs while maintaining security during interrogations."
The Post story is rather interesting, although it's written in a very convoluted way. It basically says that the Army investigation is portraying clear acts of commission as if they were acts of omission -- even though they have evidence that Sanchez ordered the use of dogs, they attribute the use of dogs to unclear policy and "confusion."
The text of the Sanchez cable was not included in public copies of the Army's report, but was obtained by The Washington Post from a government official upset by what Sanchez approved.The authors of the Army report did not accuse Sanchez of directly instigating abuse, and they did not cite the contents of his memo in the unclassified version. But Army Gen. Paul J. Kern -- who oversaw the drafting of the report -- said in an interview last week that Sanchez "wrote a policy which was not clear," and that by doing so, he allowed junior officers to conclude mistakenly that they were following an official policy as they stepped over a legal line.
This interpretation of the role senior officials played -- that they committed sins of omission, rather than commission by writing ambiguous instructions and then failing to police the errant ways of subordinates -- is likely to be challenged in court, according to lawyers for some of the soldiers on trial in connection with the prison abuse.
In other words, the Army deliberately hid documents in its possession showing direct orders by its own generals for use of dogs in order to create the infrastructure for the theory that the top brass is only responsible for not being clear enough in discouraging those few bad apples from actions they took totally and completely on their own:
The Army report quoted Sanchez as saying he "never approved use of dogs." Fay also said in the report that "no documentation was found" showing approval by the Combined Joint Task Force 7, headed by Sanchez, "to use dogs in interrogations."Asked to explain the apparent conflict between language in the report and the text of Sanchez's cable, Kern said that what Sanchez meant is that he never specifically approved an interrogation plan submitted to him for review that involved the use of dogs, while Fay said that Sanchez believes he only endorsed the general presence of muzzled dogs at the time interrogations were being conducted, rather than inside prison interrogation booths -- a practice that was clearly misunderstood.
Posted by zeynep at August 31, 2004 01:23 AM
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Comments
If someone can convince me that the crimes inside Abu Ghraib Prison were not authorized by Donald Rumsfeld (fat chance of that!!), I will vote for George Bush in November. Those words look creepy even just being written hypothetically!! I would gargle with rattlesnake venom before I would vote for a Bush Whacker. But there is no way in an administration as rigidly controlled as Bush-43 that the policies and tactics being employed in Iraq are not coming directly from the Rove-Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld-Ashcroft inner circle. These people have been wrong about everything that they've done since they took office. At least they're consistent. It has been their chronically and acutely bad judgments that have made such an entire mess of this Bush-43 presidency, and have destablized the entire global community in every way imaginable.
Sincerely,
Old & In The Way
Posted by: Phil Cicchi at August 31, 2004 02:41 AM