Holding the Pentagon Accountable: For Abu Ghraib

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http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/26/opinion/26thurs1.html?th

 

August 26, 2004

Holding the Pentagon Accountable: For Abu Ghraib

 

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.

 

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company