It sounds like the big news this week will be an extremely damaging article on Rumsfeld in the New Yorker,

http://newyorker.com/printable/?fact/040524fa_fact

A lot of people have expressed the opinion that this was just a few "bad apple" soldiers. This is the first real evidence that things may not be as it seems, and that this will involve a lot of Washington higher ups. Is any of this changing anyone's mind?
Do you think this will lead to Rumsfeld ouster?

A leftie rag takes a shot at a rightie? Wow, what a revelation!

I'll wait for the courts martial and the Congressional hearings. If there's compelling evidence of negligence or worse, complicity, up the chain then the entire chain of command needs to go, private to Scty of Defense.

B

In other news Kerrys daughter shows her Cannes.

Hersh's article says, "The roots of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal lie not in the criminal inclinations of a few Army reservists but in a decision, approved last year by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, to expand a highly secret operation, which had been focussed on the hunt for Al Qaeda, to the interrogation of prisoners in Iraq."

Has the Pentagon denied that statement?

The Pentagon's statement in response to the New Yorker article was filled with so many strong-sounding adjectives, I took it for granted that the statement denied the allegations in the article. Not necessarily so. As Josh Marshall points out, the Pentagon's statement is less than a clear denial. The Pentagon's response is here.

The Pentagon statement opens with this: "The article in this week's New Yorker Magazine by Seymour Hersh is based on what appears to be a single anonymous source that makes dramatically false assertions. The burden of proof for these false claims rests upon the reporter." Clearly they are denying something, but does the denial cover the central allegation against Rumsfeld? Hard to tell.

Here are a couple of other parts of the Pentagon statement that appear to be very carefully crafted: "..."The abuse evidenced in the videos and photos, and any similar abuse that may come to light in any of the ongoing half dozen investigations into this matter, has no basis in any sanctioned program, training manual, instruction, or order in the Department of Defense. No responsible official of the Department of Defense approved any program that could conceivably have been intended to result in such abuses as witnessed in the recent photos and videos..."

Is that a denial of Hersh's central allegation? It seems so, but it is hard to tell when you have the Rumsfeld Defense Department parsing its words, especially when you are talking about alleged secret operations. If the Pentagon was in a position to directly deny the central allegation against Rumsfeld, don't you think they would do so?

So a denial of a story's veracity is an admission of complicity?

B

Of course not.

Are you comfortable with the wording of the Pentagon's statement? Doesn't it sound weasly to you? Why don't they say that Rumsfeld did not approve a plan "to expand a highly secret operation, which had been focussed on the hunt for Al Qaeda, to the interrogation of prisoners in Iraq"? I can think of two reasons why they did not deny that statement: (1) the program is secret and they don't want to talk about it; and/or (2) the statement is true.

I am glad to see you are willing to wait for the courts martial and the Congressional hearings before deciding how you will defend the Bush administration. That's more than caveman Inhoff was willing to do.

"defend the Bush administration"? Re-read what I wrote.

B

I was just taking a cheap shot.

Another view (Stratfor):

Geopolitical Diary: Monday, May 17, 2004

The Abu Ghraib prison affair has now boiled down to this: There is
widespread speculation, most recently by The New Yorker's Seymour Hirsch, asserting that the abuses were part of an approved pattern of prisoner interrogation used first in Afghanistan and then transferred to Iraq with the approval of U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and other senior civilian and military leaders. Whether Rumsfeld or others knew precisely what these protocols were at the time they approved them is left open to question, but what is rejected is the idea that a handful of enlisted personnel -- acting on their own -- carried out the abuse.

The Pentagon rejected this view entirely on Sunday. Pentagon spokesman Lawrence Di Rita said, "No responsible official of the Department of Defense approved any program that could conceivably have been intended to result in such abuses as witnessed in the recent photos and videos. This story seems to reflect the fevered insights of those with little, if any, connection to the activities in the Department of Defense." The Pentagon's position is therefore that the abuse was a violation of Defense Department policy -- and that the guilty were, in fact, enlisted personnel violating standing orders, and that any speculation to the contrary is unwarranted.

If the Pentagon's position is to be believed, then we must also believe that enlisted personnel were left unsupervised by officers for an extended period of time. The activities shown on the tape do not reflect five minutes of work; they reflect an extended period of activity. Enlisted men are supervised by officers. The prison had an officer of the day on duty, and one would expect there to be numerous officers on duty all the time in a brigade-level operation.

It is impossible to charge this many enlisted men without charging at least one officer with dereliction of duty. Someone who should have been supervising the enlisted personnel failed to carry out his duty. That his failure to supervise his subordinate properly resulted in a violation of the Uniform Code of Military Justice is a very serious charge to make against an officer, especially when the offenses took place over an extended period of time. Yet no officer has yet been brought up on charges. Some have been reprimanded or admonished, but no one has been charged with the obvious offense on which all the other offenses rest: If the officer did not order the abuse, he was derelict in not detecting and stopping it.

So far, two specialists and two sergeants have been charged. No officers. The enlisted men will claim, according to the media, that they were following orders given them by U.S. intelligence officers -- both CIA and military intelligence. But those orders would probably not have been transmitted to them directly. Unless they had been transferred to the command of military intelligence and out of military police, any such orders would have passed through the chain of command in the prison. Somewhere, in the chain of command, an order would have had to be given that the troops farther down the line were under the orders of a particular officer from MI. It stands to reason that somebody gave that order, and somebody accepted it -- and tasked the sergeants, who tasked the enlisted men.

Now those orders might never have been given; the sergeants may have authorized the actions on their own. That would be fair -- but then we need to hear the names of the officers above the sergeants who failed to supervise this delicate task appropriately. We need their names and the dates of their courts-martial, and then Mr. Di Rita's outrage can be vindicated. But -- and we do know a bit about the Department of Defense --
when a bunch of enlistment men are court-martialed while their officers are put on a track where the worst outcome is early retirement, then something stinks. The enlisted men cannot be guilty without some officers being guilty too. Not on something like this.

So since Mr. Di Rita is so outraged by fevered conspiracy theories, let's throw another one in his lap. The enlisted men would not have received orders directly from MI or the CIA. That would have gone to an officer. They might have been told that the orders came from outside the MP chain of command, but they never themselves heard the orders given. Their defense is pure hearsay. If officers are directly charged in this, some of them will
know the names of the people who gave the order, will have been present when the orders were given and will force the Army to produce those officers to testify under oath. Hence, enlisted men get courts-martial, officers get reprimands. Much safer.

Now a bunch of courts-martial for officers might be coming next week. The wheels of justice turn slowly in the military, although things screamed through on the enlisted personnel. All of our concerns may be unfounded in the end. It could turn out to be an isolated case of abuse, and the officers responsible could be about to be charged. It could happen -- but it is not what we think will happen.

Here is the problem. The art of interrogation is a delicate, psychological process. It requires complete control of the prisoner's environment, designed to isolate and break down the defenses of the prisoner. Were there no abuse, the professional interrogator would still insist on total control and oversight of the prisoners' environment; otherwise, he cannot do his job. If these were important prisoners who were believed to hold vital intelligence, there is no way that those charged with interrogating them would have lost control of the prison environment. That environment was their primary professional tool -- and as professionals, it was their job to control everything that the prisoner saw, heard or sensed in any way.

If this was -- as the Pentagon has said -- a prison housing high-value, dangerous enemies of the United States, then it is obvious that extremely tight control of prison conditions had to be maintained. Even if no abuse were present, maximum psychological pressure had to be maintained. That means that the interrogation staff called the shots, or if they themselves
did not know what was happening to the prisoners, they are another group awaiting court-martial -- because it was their job to know with infinite precision the experiences their prisoners were having.

If the Pentagon is right, that means that not only the MP officers were derelict in their duty, but also that Military Intelligence humint interrogators were derelict. In fact, if the Pentagon's version of events is true, what they are saying is this: "We can't be blamed for anything. We are too incompetent to be held responsible." From an analytic point of view, the Pentagon is playing a very dangerous game. If its view of the situation
turns out to be correct, Di Rita is saying that no one but enlisted men was responsible because the officers were incompetent. Alternatively, if it becomes clear at the courts-martial of the enlisted personnel that uncharged superior officers knew what was going on, what little credibility the Defense Department has on this matter will be further dissipated.

It just does not seem to us that the Defense Department will be able to get out of town on this defense. Arguing that "we're not guilty, we're just stupid" is not a good argument to make to a country at war. The best possible explanation still does not work.

If they didn't do it, why did they not categorically deny it? The whole statement is typical Bush admin misinformation.

Ok, then let's look at this instead:

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,120072,00.html

Lets all get superheated and come to conclusions before there are trials and Congressional hearings.

Trial? We don't need no stinking trials. Evidence just gets in teh way of a good lynching.

B

Some here were completely convinced of Rumsfeld's guilt before the crimes occurred.

Mark Helprin wrote and excellent essay in the WSJ online published today. Its a long read, too long for this forum. If you want weapons to bash the Repos or Demos, there's plenty of rocks for everybody.

http://www.opinionjournal.com/columnists/mhelprin/?id=110005090

Botnst

War cheerleader dismisses critique of warmonger. Wow what a revelation!