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"Why did it happen and who was to blame?"
May. 14th, 2004 12:04 pmThere's no way that I'm going to be able to write a comprehensive analysis of everything that leads me to believe that what happened in Abu Ghraib was the outcome of deliberate choices from people very high up the chain of command. For now, let these few strands stand as emblems of what
First: War is one of the worst things that humans can do. Any war, no matter how big or small, is chaotic and uncontrollable, and chaos and uncontrol rampage across it. (There's a passage in Citadel of the Autarch in which Severian explains that, as one who had not seen it, he conceived of war as a series of events. As a veteran, he realizes that it is a living thing which does what it will. Wolfe served in Korea in the 1950s.) Anyone who thought that abuses of prisoners wouldn't happen was foolish; anyone in the chain of command who didn't take active steps to prevent abuses of prisoners was criminally negligent. Donald Rumsfeld's attitude towards the actual day-to-day conduct of events on the ground has been very much one of "bad things happen in a war, so it's foolish to stop them", so it's hard to picture him taking active steps to curtail abuses.
Second: As I've noted elsewhere--in my big rasff post, for instance--the highers-up actively rejected help from people who were experienced in handling prisoners in a way that reduces abuse.
Third: The setup at Abu Ghraib was such that the people who were actually managing the prisoners were not members of the miltary, and are thus not bound by the US's Universal Code of Military Justice. It's hard to imagine that this was an accident.
Fourth: The US government (in the person of Solicitor General Ted Olson) argued to the US Supreme Court just a week ago that it was vitally important that the Executive branch of the US government be allowed to treat prisoners on foreign soil without any form of supervision from either of the other branches of government.
Fifth: Josh Marshall has been reading the Intl. Committee of the Red Cross report on the treatment of prisoners in Iraq. Here's the key paragraph of his summary analysis:
This is a matter of organized policy, war crimes as a formalized approach.
Note that when I said "Rumsfeld" above, I meant "Rumsfeld and his superiors". George Rutherford Bush probably had no idea what specifically was being done in Abu Ghraib, but the President doesn't get excused from war crimes committed by the US Army by the expedient of not taking any steps to prevent them.
First: War is one of the worst things that humans can do. Any war, no matter how big or small, is chaotic and uncontrollable, and chaos and uncontrol rampage across it. (There's a passage in Citadel of the Autarch in which Severian explains that, as one who had not seen it, he conceived of war as a series of events. As a veteran, he realizes that it is a living thing which does what it will. Wolfe served in Korea in the 1950s.) Anyone who thought that abuses of prisoners wouldn't happen was foolish; anyone in the chain of command who didn't take active steps to prevent abuses of prisoners was criminally negligent. Donald Rumsfeld's attitude towards the actual day-to-day conduct of events on the ground has been very much one of "bad things happen in a war, so it's foolish to stop them", so it's hard to picture him taking active steps to curtail abuses.
Second: As I've noted elsewhere--in my big rasff post, for instance--the highers-up actively rejected help from people who were experienced in handling prisoners in a way that reduces abuse.
Third: The setup at Abu Ghraib was such that the people who were actually managing the prisoners were not members of the miltary, and are thus not bound by the US's Universal Code of Military Justice. It's hard to imagine that this was an accident.
Fourth: The US government (in the person of Solicitor General Ted Olson) argued to the US Supreme Court just a week ago that it was vitally important that the Executive branch of the US government be allowed to treat prisoners on foreign soil without any form of supervision from either of the other branches of government.
Fifth: Josh Marshall has been reading the Intl. Committee of the Red Cross report on the treatment of prisoners in Iraq. Here's the key paragraph of his summary analysis:
Look further into the report and you see that the kind of "ill-treatment" they're talking about is pretty much like the stuff we've been seeing in those pictures. The fact that this only seemed to happen while most prisoners were in the interrogation phase, and then generally to the ones who Military Intelligence thought might have really choice information, tells you that this wasn't a matter of a breakdown of authority or rogue sadists (though those were probably in the mix too) but rather a matter of organized policy.
This is a matter of organized policy, war crimes as a formalized approach.
Note that when I said "Rumsfeld" above, I meant "Rumsfeld and his superiors". George Rutherford Bush probably had no idea what specifically was being done in Abu Ghraib, but the President doesn't get excused from war crimes committed by the US Army by the expedient of not taking any steps to prevent them.
