In this new piece, Fred Kaplan hits on key point in the unfolding prison abuse scandal — one that is, oddly, easy to overlook with all the daily revelations.
Set aside, for the moment, the underlying claims and misdeeds. Right out of the gate, multiple officials at the White House and the Pentagon pretty clearly lied about their own roles in putting in place the policies that led directly to what was taking place in those photos and went along with trying to pin the whole thing on these half dozen jokers whose pictures we’ve now seen again and again.
The whole progression of the story has an odd doubled-up quality. On the one hand we have repeated claims from top officials insisting that the abuses were the isolated work of a few miscreants. Then, simultaneously, we have numerous stories showing specific policy decisions (often confirmed on the record by slightly lower-level officials) which sanctioned pretty close to all the stuff we’re seeing in those photos, even if not quite practiced with the same relish and glee.
This new article in Tuesday’s Times says that the the head of military intelligence at Abu Ghraib apparently put military police at the disposal of interrogators and gave them orders to do stuff like strip detainees, shackle them and generally give them a working over (though only, he said, when there was “some good reason”). But, along with this, there was no superivision of what they were doing and no guidelines or rules given to them saying what was acceptable and what wasn’t. And remember, this isn’t the testimony of a disinterested observer, but rather someone who is on the line for a lot of it and who presumably has an interest in putting the best face possible on the situation.
At a minimum, that sounds like giving benzine, some cordite, a gallon of gas, firecrackers, and a hundred rolls of toilet paper to some teenagers, telling them to see if they could put it all together to have some fun in the neighborhood on Friday night and then leaving them to their own devices.
And, remember, that’s the generous interpretation.
