OxBlog

Wednesday, May 12, 2004

# Posted 8:58 PM by Ariel David Adesnik  

WATCH OUT FOR HEROES: Both the WaPo and NYT have posted unabashedly positive profiles of Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba. In a scandal plagued with lies and incompetence, Taguba has emerged as one of the few individuals whose honesty and professionalism can be admired by all. By himself, Taguba has done more to restore the good name of the armed forces than all of the President's apologies combined. Without question, Taguba is a hero.

My concern, however, is that the comforting presence of such hero may prevent both politicians and journalists from fully exposing the personal and institutional failures that created Abu Ghraib. According to the WaPo account of Taguba's congressional testimony, the General
found no evidence the misconduct was based on orders from high-ranking officers or involved a deliberate policy to stretch legal limits on extracting information from detainees.

Instead, Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba attributed the scandal to the willful actions of a small group of soldiers and to "a failure of leadership" and supervision by brigade and lower-level commanders.
While technically accurate, this description creates a false dichotomy between orders-from-above and initiative-from-below. Yet Taguba himself was careful to note that
he did not conduct his investigation any higher in the chain of command than General Karpinski, leaving open the possibility that responsibility for the failure in leadership went higher than General Karpinski.
According to Gen. Karpinski, she sparred constantly with May. Gen. Miller and Lt. Gen. Sanchez about how to run the prison system in Iraq. The involvement of officers as high-ranking as Miller and Sanchez means that the issues being discussed were important enough for the Secretary of Defense and his subordinates to be playing close attention. An exploration of their role is critical to this investigation.

The place to begin such an investigation is with the contradictions between the testimony of Gen. Taguba and Undersecretary of Defense Stephen Cambone. Until we reconcile their statements, we won't really know what American policy in Abu Ghraib was. While neither Rumsfeld nor his subordinates have been exceptionally forthcoming in response to public and congressional, I think the NYT gets things very wrong when it says that
The administration and its Republican allies appear to have settled on a way to deflect attention from the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib: accuse Democrats and the news media of overreacting, then pile all of the remaining responsibility onto officers in the battlefield, far away from President Bush and his political team.
Yes, Dick Cheney said that "Don Rumsfeld is the best secretary of defense the United States has ever had," and that "people ought to get off his case and let him do his job." But the administration's real strategy for dealing with this scandal is far more prosaic: distort the truth and hope that nobody is paying attention.

When President Bush first went on Arab television to denounce the human rights violations at Abu Ghraib, I had hoped that his response was the first step that this administration would take to correct its mistakes, not the last. But since then, the President has let Cheney, Rumsfeld & Co. evade responsibility. While I don't believe that Bush is complicit in this effort, his inability to recognize the ethical failures of his closest advisers is a sort of moral blindness all its own.
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