The truth we've all known about Abu Ghraib...a few years too late.

Everyone should read the following article from the New Yorker:

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/06/25/070625fa_fact_hersh?currentPage=1

My comments are my own. All quotations are from the above article.

This article describes the intricate procedures and chain of command by which events like Abu Ghraib are allowed to transpire, and the calculation with which deniability is manufactured by high ranking members of the military, as well as civilian leadership.

Now, it has been obvious for a while that these horrific events were not simply the work of a few low-level soldiers. My friends serving in Iraq have told me as much in confessional tones, that these behaviors are the exception rather than the rule, and that the only violation of procedure in this case was the photographic documentation of the acts.

The basic problem is that, given the strict control of the civilian press by the military, the only people in a position to expose these abuses are the ones with the most vested interest in keeping them a secret: The US Military. All that stands in the way of this cover-up is the integrity and honesty of common soldiers and officers. The same qualities that the armed forces deem secondary to loyalty and blind obedience.

The other mechanism in place to prevent these abuses is, of course, congressional oversight. The article says:

By law, the President must make a formal finding authorizing a C.I.A. covert operation, and inform the senior leadership of the House and the Senate Intelligence Committees. However, the Bush Administration unilaterally determined after 9/11 that intelligence operations conducted by the military—including the Pentagon’s covert task forces—for the purposes of “preparing the battlefield” could be authorized by the President, as Commander-in-Chief, without telling Congress.

So there is problem number one. Congress (which is not nearly aggressive enough in oversight anyway) was kept in the dark by an administration driven mad by fear-induced power.

The second problem was related, and potentially as serious: Those in the Special Operations community suffering under the same delusion of power, who decided to operate (or were forced by circumstances to operate) outside of designated guidelines. Again, the NY Article:

J.S.O.C.’s special status undermined military discipline. Richard Armitage, the former Deputy Secretary of State, told me that, on his visits to Iraq, he increasingly found that “the commanders would say one thing and the guys in the field would say, ‘I don’t care what he says. I’m going to do what I want.’ We’ve sacrificed the chain of command to the notion of Special Operations and GWOT”—the global war on terrorism.

So either way what we have here is a breakdown in the checks and balances that are supposed to control the behavior of our armed forces. The fact is that we will never know which it was, such are the pitfalls of allowing people to classify their missions and prevent transparency from ever being achieved.

But what we can say is that the secrecy of our secret operations has gotten totally out of control. From the article:

A former high-level Defense Department official said that, when the Abu Ghraib scandal broke, Senator John Warner, then the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, was warned “to back off” on the investigation, because “it would spill over to more important things.” A spokesman for Warner acknowledged that there had been pressure on the Senator, but said that Warner had stood up to it—insisting on putting Rumsfeld under oath for his May 7th testimony, for example, to the Secretary’s great displeasure.

What the article fails to mention is who could possibly have put pressure on a high-ranking senator. Who could have the secrecy to avoid being named in the article, yet have the power to force a sitting senator to "stand up to" him, rather than simply tell him to shut the hell up?

The very existence of any such person is a huge problem for this country. It literally smacks of the SS, or the KGB under the worst auspices of Communist Russia. I am not merely using these analogies to make a point. We in the free world CANNOT allow people to wield this sort of power from the shadows, any more than we can allow the people high up in our military or civilian leadership to claim they were unaware of abuses as a defense of their inaction. In a lengthy quote from the article:

Nevertheless, Rumsfeld, in his appearances before the Senate and the House Armed Services Committees on May 7th, claimed to have had no idea of the extensive abuse. “It breaks our hearts that in fact someone didn’t say, ‘Wait, look, this is terrible. We need to do something,’ ” Rumsfeld told the congressmen. “I wish we had known more, sooner, and been able to tell you more sooner, but we didn’t.”

Rumsfeld told the legislators that, when stories about the Taguba report appeared, “it was not yet in the Pentagon, to my knowledge.” As for the photographs, Rumsfeld told the senators, “I say no one in the Pentagon had seen them”; at the House hearing, he said, “I didn’t see them until last night at 7:30.” Asked specifically when he had been made aware of the photographs, Rumsfeld said:

"There were rumors of photographs in a criminal prosecution chain back sometime after January 13th . . . I don’t remember precisely when, but sometime in that period of January, February, March. . . . The legal part of it was proceeding along fine. What wasn’t proceeding along fine is the fact that the President didn’t know, and you didn’t know, and I didn’t know.
And, as a result, somebody just sent a secret report to the press, and there they are,” Rumsfeld said.

Taguba (A full General, the primary investigating officer into the scandal, who has since taken a forced retirement), watching the hearings, was appalled. He believed that Rumsfeld’s testimony was simply not true. “The photographs were available to him—if he wanted to see them,” Taguba said. Rumsfeld’s lack of knowledge was hard to credit. Taguba later wondered if perhaps Cambone had the photographs and kept them from Rumsfeld because he was reluctant to give his notoriously difficult boss bad news.

There are two possibilities here. One is that Rumsfeld is lying, and he was aware of the abuses. In that case, he is a human rights violator not qualitatively different than Saddam Hussein. The other is that he is telling the truth, and he didn't know. What it's impotrant to understand is that having your underlings in a place where they fail to inform you of something this serious is not deniability, it is negligence. It is not WORSE is Rumsfeld's underlings knew of this and failed to tell him, and he failed to ask, but it isn't that much better. He has still failed this country miserably. And anyone else in the chain of command, up to and including the President, who was similarly ill-informed, is equally negligent.

Finally, we come to the cover up, always the easiest part to prove and, in this case, actually the easiest to condemn. I've seen the Abu Ghraib photos, and they are terrible, but I do not hate the soldiers in them. I've often said that these kinds of abuses have occured in every war that has ever been fought, and will occur in every war that is ever waged. The point is that you cannot dehumanize a population enough to kill them, yet maintain an understanding of their dignity as human beings, enough to prevent rape and torture from occurring.

So the question of real importance is whether this torture was the sad but natural consequence of war, or the calculated policy of those tasked to oversee and prosecute the strategy. The following quote from the article may shed some light:

The former senior intelligence official said that when the images of Abu Ghraib were published, there were some in the Pentagon and the White House who “didn’t think the photographs were that bad”—in that they put the focus on enlisted soldiers, rather than on secret task-force operations. Referring to the task-force members, he said, “Guys on the inside ask me, ‘What’s the difference between shooting a guy on the street, or in his bed, or in a prison?’ ” A Pentagon consultant on the war on terror also said that the “basic strategy was ‘prosecute the kids in the photographs but protect the big picture.’ ”

Let me answer the question posed in that second to last sentence. The difference between shooting a guy in the street, as opposed to in his bed or in a prison, is that in the street, the guy has a chance to shoot back. That's the difference between a war and a massacre.

There are basically two sides in this conflict (That would be the conflict over the cover-up/information failure in Abu Ghraib. There are, unfortunately, many more sides than that in the Iraq War.). One side is the portion of the civilian and military leadership that claims no abuses are occuring, and no cover-up has occured, with reference to Abu Ghraib. They claim that aggressive investigation techniques are just that, and that the reported acts that are clearly torture did not occur. The other side is the other portion of the leadership, which says that there are unimaginable abuses happening at Abu Ghraib and other places around the world, and that the leadership, particularly the civilian leadership, right up to and including former Secretary Rumsfeld, did everything they could to obfuscate the acts.

Now, I want to point out two things. One is that one of the primary people on the second side is General Taguba, the guy who was specifically assigned to investigate this matter, who has spent more time than anyone looking at these issues, and who has since been (by his own account) ostracized by the military leadership and forced into early retirement in spite of his years of dedicated service. The second is that what we are really arguing about here is the semantics of torture, and whether or not the things that occured at Abu Ghraib are widespread or isolated instruments. What actually happened there is not at issue. As I said, I have personally SEEN PICTURES of people being tortured. That case is closed.

Normally I am all about shades of grey, but in this case, one or the other group is lying. Their accounts of what has happened are diametrically opposed. Either Rumsfeld had seen the pictures or he hadn't. Either he told people to cover it up or he did not. Either instructions came down to put the MP's in charge of softening prisoners up, or they did not. There doesn't seem to be a lot of middle ground here, as much as Rumsfeld, et al would like to create one.

The leadership insisting there is no torture and no coverup (Rumsfeld, et al) are protecting an organization which makes them among the most powerful people in the world. They are also protecting themselves from criminal prosecution from human rights violations. And they are doing it by sacrificing people with no power or voice to fight back.

The leadership claiming a coverup (Taguba, et al) are stirring up a hornet's nest within an organization they have dedicated their lives to. They are being widely criticized and ostracized by their peers, and in many cases they are ruining their careers.

The nice thing about a blog is that it is not a court of law. I don't have to prove anything, I don't even have to draw conclusions. So let me just pose this question. Given the two previous sets of circumstances, who does it seem would be more likely to lie?