Jon Johanning
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While you were answering Dwayne, D was answering me. So...
See, I am not satisfied with tracing up the chain of command on who may or may not have authorized torture. Firing Rumsfeld will not get rid of the system he and others put together.
The news reports are still missing the main outline of what Abu Ghraib is. Yes it is a torture center. But even if detainees were not tortured or abused, the whole system of which Abu Ghraib is just one center, would still be a gross violation of US civilian and military law, and international law concerning the conduct of war.
Taguba listed his references in the front of his report and they included the US military codes of justice, UN Geneva Conventions, US Army manuals on military police operations, command policy, use of contractors along with photos, earlier reports by Miller and Ryder. Most of this is probably what the Senate Committee is complaining about missing.
The committee will find the Miller report recommended that MP guards assist MI interrogators. That's what Guantanamo does. This assistance according to Taguba is against Army policy (he cites references), and Taguba specifically recommends against this practice.
In a normal military brig what Taguba says makes sense. You want the MP guards neutral since their duties normally have nothing to do with why the people in detention are being held. Interrogators in a normal situation are gathering evidence and testimony for a military trial or hearing. In that context, if guards are beating prisoners, then it corrupts the prisoner testimony to investigators---taints the evidence investigators are trying to gather. Beating confessions out of suspects is still against procedure even in the military.
But in the Abu Ghraib system, there is no trial and no hearing. Guard beatings are a facilitation to investigation since there will be no legal determination or hearing about the guilt or innocence of detainees at all. What is at issue is not the detainee's guilt or innocence of a crime, but only what he or she may or may not know. They are not held because they are suspected of committing
a crime. They are being held because they might know something.
So, Miller understood what the Abu Ghraib system was supposed to do, which was extract information like his system does routinely at Guantanamo. Taguba didn't understand or just reminded his superiors that proper military procedures were not followed. Whether Taguba understood or not that what he was reviewing was not a military justice system, he carefully cited standard procedures for a military justice system and left it at that.
We are (hopefully) at the opening phase of something like Watergate, when there was a concerted effort to keep the case focused on the lowest level, the burglars. Even then it was understood that somebody much higher up paid the Cubans to burgle the Democratic HQ. But the burglary was just part of a larger set of operations. Yes, the news media traced it to the Committee To Re-Elect The President, CREEP. But it took John Dean in extended and cooperative testimony in a Senate hearing to sketch out the whole system, with Nixon, Haldemann, Erlichman and Dean at the center of a whole network of illegal activities, of which Watergate was just one instance.
The secondary line of Nixon's cover-up and defense after CREEP was implicated was to hand over its chairman, John Mitchell who had already made himself a target with midnight phone calls to news editors.
So getting back to Abu Ghraib, the Bush WH secondary line of defense should be to have Rumsfeld fall on his sword. If I were a strategist for eager Demos on a investigation committee, I would recommend against pushing for Rumsfeld's resignation. You want him in public office, without a defense attorney with him so you can compel his testimony under oath before Congress. He will eventually hang himself because he thinks what he put together as Abu Ghraib was the right thing to do---their just Iraqi terrorists, who cares what happens to them, we're at war, national security demands, etc, etc.
On the other hand, I am not sure what the Pentagon should be doing to cover its ass. Maybe firing generals isn't a good idea either. Once they are out of the service they don't have to follow orders, so you lose control over what they say. They will rat you out, just like anybody else squirming on the hot seat. There was a report yesterday on Yahoo News that Sanchez was going to be replaced.
Sitting behind all this torture business is the Patriot Act where the same system is put together for detainees rotting in evil Ashcroft's dungeons. So Congress may ultimately only have itself to blame.
What Rumsfeld did was take the same general ideas outlined in the Patriot Act and apply them to military operations in the field---of course it might have been the other way around---CIA methods polished up for domestic application. But in any case, just as the Patriot Act violates just about every legal protection there is against state power, so US military operation of Abu Ghraib violates just about every legal protection against abuse of military power. They are both Gestapos, mirrors to each other. One has a uniform and the other has a suit.
As Nixon said when he announced the invasion of Cambodia, `This is the Nixon Doctrine in its purest form.' After a few months that didn't seem pure enough so he ordered up more carpet bombing.
Evidently Abu Ghraib is the Bush Doctrine in its purest form.
CG