> What we've all learned from Tailhook and from the
> Air Force Academy rape revelations and from
> Watergate and from My Lai, what we've learned but
> what we need to keep relearning is: always ask
> about the entire organizational decision-making
> process, the entire institutional culture. What
> is considered normal? What's considered trivial?
> What's considered allowable? What's considered
> outrageous? Feminists have become very smart
> about this because they have had to learn all
> these skills to find out how sexual harassment
> happens in a law firm or in an automobile
> manufacturer, or in the military. At the top and
> in the middle of an organization, the directives
> that cumulatively make up the culture look either
> benign or bland or "civilized", "rational",
> "modern", if you will, "suited".
>
> Whereas, further down in the hierarchy, the
> actions taken to carry out those instructions
> from above look cruder, more obvious, more
> blatant. It doesn't mean that the people, the men
> and women, that is both Charles Graner and
> Lynndie England, and their compatriots in the
> military police unit, in the reservists unit, it
> doesn't mean they shouldn't be held accountable.
> They absolutely should be, but that's the
> beginning of the story, not the end of the story.
> The further up the chain of command we get, the
> blander the instructions will sound. We've really
> got to learn how to be outraged at things that,
> at first hearing, sound bland.
Good point indeed, but going up the hierarchy level and missing "willing executioners" on middle and lower levels has also been used to exonerate. A good case in point is the Nazi trials - the party leadership got blamed, whereas the "willing executioners" (e.g. the judicial apparatus that manned the 'people's courts' the respectable burghers who got rich of slave labor and looted by Nazi property) basically got a slap on the wrist or off the hook altogether.
Wojtek