Abu Ghraib and the Pentagon
~~article_author~~ NYT
Friday, August 27, 2004
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 U.S. Army's internal investigation, released Wednesday, 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 George
W. Bush's decision to declare Iraq a front in the war against terror, to
government
lawyers finding ways to circumvent the Geneva conventions, to 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 by 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 Rumsfeld, who should have resigned
over this
disaster months ago. Direct condemnation is reserved for those 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 Al Qaeda and Taliban members captured in
Afghanistan and
imprisoned in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Interrogators wanted to force these
prisoners to talk
in ways that are barred by U.S. 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, Rumsfeld authorized techniques like hooding prisoners,
using dogs to
terrify them, forcing them into "stress positions" for long periods,
stripping them,
shaving them and isolating them. These actions were prohibited by the
Geneva conventions,
but 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 Rumsfeld
rescinded some of the
extreme techniques. Then another legal review further narrowed the list,
and Rumsfeld
issued yet another memo on April 16, 2003. The civilian panel said the
memos confused
field commanders, who thought that harsh interrogations were allowed, and
that things
could have been made clearer if Rumsfeld had allowed a real legal debate
in the first
place. Yet the panel places no fault on Rumsfeld for the cascade of
disastrous events that
followed.
According to the report, U.S. 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.
Major General
Geoffrey Miller, who had been running the Guantánamo prison, went to Iraq
in August 2003,
bringing the harsh interrogation rules with him. The report said
Lieutenant General
Ricardo Sanchez, the commander in Iraq, used his advice to approve a dozen
"aggressive
interrogation techniques," and that Sanchez was "using reasoning" from the
president's
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 Miller, nor does it
say that he was
sent to Iraq by Rumsfeld's staff. All these decisions were happening in a
chaotic context.
The civilian panel 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 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 Bush and designed
by 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 James Schlesinger, the panel's chairman, made the absurd
argument that firing
Rumsfeld would aid "the enemy." That is reminiscent of the comment Bush
made last spring
when he visited the Pentagon to view images of American soldiers torturing
Iraqi prisoners
and then announced that 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 (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.
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