(Fwd Joanna Bujes):
Taguba, who prepared the Army's report on abuse in the prison, may be the most fearless man in uniform. "Failure in leadership, sir," he replied, "from the brigade commander on down, lack of discipline, no training whatsoever and no supervision."
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I don't mean to sound overly harsh on the one Army general who stepped up to the plate, but read the report. Type any of these: `taguba' or `article 15-6', or `cjtf-7' and you will get a link to a download. CJTF stands for coalition joint task force and AOR stands for area of operations. It's nasty reading in military jargon and is fifty pages long. But I think it is worth the effort, if anyone is interested.
I don't trust the military mind, at all. I think Taguba was doing TYA for the regular army, and subtly steering any future investigation that he knew would blow the lid off toward Military Intelligence units who actually ran the prison. He hung Karpinski out to dry because she was technically the direct in-line commander for the MP's featured in the photos. But she was also part of the reserves.
The guys in the shop (at my work) are all ex-military from Vietnam era and they decided this was the typical military mind covering a foobar, fucked up beyond all recognition. The technique is to absolutely follow written procedures, stick absolutely to the book, every word, every phrase. If you follow the rules you can not be faulted, and essentially the procedures protect you from recrimination. Since Karpinski and the MP reserves didn't follow any rules you can hang them, and close the book on that level. And that is what Taguba did.
On the other hand, once that is done you are left with an incomplete answer as to how these sorts of practices which Taguba called `system-wide' occurred.
If you noticed in the hearings the other day, the DoD put their intelligence asshole Stephan Cambone, Undersecretary for Defense, next to general Taguba. That seating arrangement was direct intimidation message by Rumsfeld to the regular Army, General Taguba. Plus they had the fucking JCS behind him. Taguba was on the hot seat, and so I agree he was courageous in refusing to flinch or defer. But the way that he could do that was to know the procedures and rules to the absolute letter. Cambone wasn't up to a hard core Army stone wall, precisely because he didn't know the protocols, procedures, or rules. In fact he was probably in charged of circumventing them under Rumsfeld's direction.
I thought it looked like high drama when Taguba flatly contradicted Cambone on the line of command at Abu Ghraib.
That told me in an instant that MI first of all was the responsible authority for this shit. This is also the silent leit motif in the Taguba report. I also thought, Ah so its Cambone who directed the MI.
I thought you could see BG Janus Karpinski's dilemma, replayed at the next level, right there in the hearings. She couldn't or didn't stone wall the MI commander (i.e failure of leadership) and therefore Taguba hung her.
What Taguba was doing was closing the book on regular Army responsibility by reprimanding Karpinski and following a criminal investigation of the lower ranking but directly involved soldiers. That's pretty much the end of that road for line of inquiry. So all focus, has to default go after MI. It may or may not.
That pretty much depends on what the Congressional committee wants to know, and whether they want to know it. I just assume they will only be dragged kicking and screaming through that door. So far it looks like they will try to stop this thing by blaming reserve MP's and keep the investigation away from MI on the pretext of national security. It seems to me there is a weird balancing act going on here. If the Democrats push for investigating the MI units then they know the Repugnants will stop them.
The reason is that the obvious direction from MI leads to Cambone and from there to Rumsfeld then to Cheney and then to Bush. Bush is too arrogant and stupid to understand his War on Terror is a war crime, so Cheney is the most likely culprit. But that is where it should go. Abu Ghraib is Bush and Cheney's war on terror, and this is how Rumsfeld implemented it, through Cambone.
After reading the Taguba report I decided that he was extremely smart, more than being courageous. He doesn't look smart. He looks tough and courageous. But his real virtue is his adroit manipulation of military procedure and codes to back up his own ass, his findings and recommendations, and ultimately his loyalty to the Army.
Here is an interesting background on Cambone from:
http://rightweb.irc-online.org/ind/cambone/cambone.php
``Before taking over as the undersecretary of defense for intelligence in early 2003, Stephen Cambone, considered one of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's key aides, served on a number of influential government and nongovernmental defense review studies. He served on both the National Institute for Public Policy's Rationale and Requirements for U.S. Nuclear Forces and Arms Control study team as well as the Project for the New American Century's 2001 "Rebuilding America's Defense" report team. Both studies seem to have served as blueprints for the defense policies initiated by the administration of George W. Bush. Cambone also served on two Rumsfeld-chaired studies commissioned by Congress dealing with space weapons and the missile threat to the United States.
When Cambone was tapped to be the first ever undersecretary of defense for intelligence, some observers saw it as a Rumsfeld power grab. According to veteran defense analyst John Prados (Tompaine.com, April 14, 2003), Rumsfeld's appointment of Cambone "will allow the Defense Department to consolidate its intelligence programs in a way that could undermine CIA head George Tenet's role."
Despite -- and perhaps because of -- his close relationship to the defense secretary, Cambone is apparently widely disliked in the Pentagon. Neoconservative writer Tom Donnelly reported in the The Weekly Standard that "fairly or not, Cambone has long been viewed as Rumsfeld's henchman, almost universally loathed -- but more important, feared -- by the services." (3) And the Washington Monthly reported in late 2001, "It would be hard to exaggerate how much Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his top aide Stephen Cambone were hated within the Pentagon prior to September 11. Among other mistakes, Rumsfeld and Cambone foolishly excluded top civilian and military leaders when planning an overhaul of the military to meet new threats, thereby ensuring even greater bureaucratic resistance. According to the Washington Post, an Army general joked to a Hill staffer that 'if he had one round left in his revolver, he would take out Steve Cambone.'...''