Ezra Klein applies the headline “Doing Her Job” to this infamous photo of Lyndie England.

Lynndie England with dog at Abu Ghraib

It was not a few bad apples. It was not the chaos of war. It was official U.S. government policy. The release of the Senate Armed Services Committee’s Report on Treatment of Detainees in U.S. Custody makes that perfectly clear.

No. No. No. No.

The Report is damning in its causality argument.  Basically, the entire nature of interrogation training in the military — which precedes not only George W. Bush’s administration but his father’s as well — is based on abusing our own soldiers to teach them to cope with torture and abusive treatment such as our POWs, especially downed pilots, endured in Vietnam.  Further, the administration made a series of decisions that allowed procedures that were arguably torture to be used in isolated cases against accused terrorists and other unprivileged belligerents.  These exceptions were hazily carved out and the lines were sufficiently blurry that it wasn’t surprising that abuses occurred.   Carveouts at Gitmo naturally migrated to Iraq and Abu Ghraib, even though this wasn’t authorized.

But Lynndie England and her cohorts in the 372d MP company were not interrogators carrying out administration policy.  They were simply bullies and criminals. They were demented, poorly trained, prison guards who were abusing the prisoners in their care for personal enjoyment.

UPDATE:  To provide some context for new readers, I’ve written dozens of posts on Abu Ghraib over the years that can be found under the Iraq Prison Scandal category archives.  I’ve said over and again that the senior officers, up to at least National Guard BG Janis Karpinski, should have been held accountable for dereliction of duty.   I’ve been critical of the use of torture (waterboarding) and abusive treatment (sleep deprivation, stress positions, dogs to induce fear, etc.) as an interrogation technique in dozens of posts.

My point here is a narrow one:  England and her cohorts, the ones whose photos are the main thing the public knows about Abu Ghraib, were not carrying out official duties or in any way attempting to help break prisoners to extract information.  They were merely sadistic criminals.

Physicians for Human Rights has just published a report detailing the medical evidence of detainee torture at the hands of U.S. Personnel in Iraq, Afghanist, and Guantanamo Bay.

Maj. General Antonio Taguba (Ret.) authored the preface to the report, in which he accuses the Administration of having committed war crimes:

The profiles of these eleven former detainees, none of whom were ever charged with a crime or told why they were detained, are tragic and brutal rebuttals to those who claim that torture is ever justified. Through the experiences of these men in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo Bay, we can see the full scope of the damage this illegal and unsound policy has inflicted—both on America’s institutions and our nation’s founding values, which the military, intelligence services, and our justice system are duty-bound to defend.

In order for these individuals to suffer the wanton cruelty to which they were subjected, a government policy was promulgated to the field whereby the Geneva Conventions and the Uniform Code of Military Justice were disregarded. The UN Convention Against Torture was indiscriminately ignored. And the healing professions, including physicians and psychologists, became complicit in the willful infliction of harm against those the Hippocratic Oath demands they protect.

After years of disclosures by government investigations, media accounts, and reports from human rights organizations, there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes. The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account.

The answer to that question? No. They won’t be.

(link via Radley Balko)

The likelihood of Turkey sending troops into Iraqi Kurdistan has ratcheted up several notches, with a major assault by PKK rebels into Turkey from Iraqi territory.

An audacious cross-border ambush by Kurdish rebels based in northern Iraq killed at least 17 Turkish soldiers Sunday, ratcheting up pressure on the Turkish government to launch a military offensive into Iraq.

[...]

The raid on Turkish soldiers, among the deadliest attacks in recent memory, was carried out by the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, known by its Kurdish initials PKK. The armed group aims to create an independent Kurdish state out of parts of eastern Turkey, northern Iraq and western Iran. Turkish officials said 16 soldiers were also wounded in the fighting in Hakkari province, which borders Iraq. Thirty-two Kurdish fighters were killed in subsequent clashes and 10 Turkish troops were still missing, they said.

Abdul Rahman al-Chaderchi, a PKK spokesman, said the Kurdish fighters attacked because Turkish troops were conducting war games late Saturday near the border. He said that the death toll was higher than Turkey reported and that several soldiers were being held prisoner, but he declined to provide precise numbers. “They tried to enter the Iraqi lands,” Chaderchi said. “But our fighters have confronted them.”

Senior Turkish military and government officials held emergency meetings Sunday night to decide on a response. Turkey’s parliament voted last week to give Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government authority for a military offensive into northern Iraq to pursue Kurdish fighters hiding there. “Turkey does not have designs on Iraq’s territory,” Turkish President Abdullah Gul said after the attacks, according to the Anatolian news agency. “However, if Iraq keeps harboring terrorists, Turkey has the right to destroy this.”

At a news conference hours after the ambush, Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, who is Kurdish, ordered the guerrilla fighters to stop their attacks or leave Iraq. “We are against all the actions that are done by the PKK,” he said. “And we will not support the PKK. We want the best relations with Turkey.” But he added: “The Turkish army with all its capabilities couldn’t arrest the leaders of the PKK. So how could we do that? It’s a dream that cannot be reached.”

The immediate crisis is what seems to be an inevitable Turkish raid into Northern Iraq. Given that Talabani has admitted that he’s powerless to control his own territory, I don’t see how Erdogan can hold off demands for action. This, of course, will further complicate the Iraqi situation, perhaps unsettling the one part of the country that has been more-or-less stable since Saddam’s regime was toppled.

The other interesting issue is that yesterday’s raid theoretically triggers Article 5 of the NATO Charter:

The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defence recognised by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations, will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.

Article 6 clarifies:

For the purpose of Article 5, an armed attack on one or more of the Parties is deemed to include an armed attack:

* on the territory of any of the Parties in Europe or North America, on the Algerian Departments of France (2), [on the territory of Turkey]* or on the islands under the jurisdiction of any of the Parties in the North Atlantic area north of the Tropic of Cancer;;
* on the forces, vessels, or aircraft of any of the Parties, when in or over these territories or any other area in Europe in which occupation forces of any of the Parties were stationed on the date when the Treaty entered into force or the Mediterranean Sea or the North Atlantic area north of the Tropic of Cancer.

It’s highly unlikely that Turkey will ask for NATO assistance in this matter, much less that others will answer but the attack is certainly grounds for invoking the mutual defense pact.

Update (Dave Schuler)

There is a timely interview with Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, coincidentally the hereditary leader of one of the two most powerful Iraqi Kurdish factions, in Asharq Alawsat:

(Asharq Al-Awsat) The Turkish Government wants you to arrest their leaders who are present on Iraqi territory.

(Talabani) We cannot do that. How can we arrest the leaders who are present in the mountains and surrounded by thousands of men? The Turkish army, with all its power, cannot do that. How can we do it?

(Asharq Al-Awsat) What, then, does Nuri al-Maliki mean by his comment about eradicating their bases?

(Talabani) I do not think that this is accurate talk. The prime minister and I have the same view, namely, that we cannot send sufficient Iraqi forces to fight the PKK.

*UPDATE (James Joyner) Anderson correctly notes that the Charter was amended with the accession of Turkey to clear up any confusion resulting from the fact that Turkey’s territory overlaps the European and Asian continents. I’ve put in the amended text in brackets in the original post.

The general who presided over the Abu Ghraib scandal gave a speech yesterday railing against the incompetent administration of the Iraq War. David Cloud summarizes for the NYT:

In one of his first major public speeches since leaving the Army in late 2006, retired Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez blamed the administration for a “catastrophically flawed, unrealistically optimistic war plan” and denounced the current “surge” strategy as a “desperate” move that will not achieve long-term stability. “After more than fours years of fighting, America continues its desperate struggle in Iraq without any concerted effort to devise a strategy that will achieve victory in that war-torn country or in the greater conflict against extremism,” Mr. Sanchez said, at a gathering here of military reporters and editors.

[...]

But his role as commander in Iraq during the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal leaves General Sanchez vulnerable to criticism that that he is shifting the blame from himself and exacting revenge against an administration that replaced him as the top commander in the aftermath of the scandal and declined to nominate him for a fourth star, forcing his retirement. Though he was cleared of wrongdoing in the abuse matter by an Army investigation, he nonetheless became a symbol, along with officials like L. Paul Bremer III , the chief administrator in Iraq, of the ineffective American leadership early in the occupation.

Questioned by reporters after his speech, he included the military and himself among those who made mistakes in Iraq, citing the failure to insist on a better post-invasion stabilization plan. But his main criticism was leveled at the Bush administration, which he said he said has failed to mobilize the entire United States government, other than the military, to contribute meaningfully to reconstructing and stabilizing Iraq. “National leadership continues to believe that victory can be achieved by military power alone,” he said. “Continued manipulations and adjustments to our military strategy will not achieve victory. The best we can do with this flawed approach is stave off defeat.”

The overwhelming consensus is that Sanchez is correct on almost all counts. The main exception is the last of these; both rhetorically and in deed, there has been substantial attention paid to the non-military part of the equation.

Still, Cloud is right on Sanchez’ vulnerability as a critic. As Kelly Kennedy’s report for the Army Times (an independent paper owned by Gannett, not a government publication) makes clear, he comes across as a bitter man trying to shift blame away from himself.

Sanchez was head of coalition forces in Iraq from June 2003 to June 2004. When asked where accountability lay while he headed the forces, as well as for his part in the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, Sanchez said it was too late for him to do anything when he took over.

Sanchez retired in 2006 after he wasn’t offered another command position after the Abu Ghraib scandal broke in April 2004.

[...]

He berated the room of about 30 to 40 reporters, saying he had been portrayed as a “liar” by people who had never met him. Many of the reporters, in Arlington, Va., for a Military Reporters and Editors conference, had covered the trials that came from photos leaked to the media showing pyramids of naked Iraqi prisoners, a hooded man convinced that if he fell off a crate he would be electrocuted, and dogs snapping inches away from a prisoner.

[...]

Jaws dropped as Sanchez glared out at the room, and then eyes rolled as he spent an hour blaming everyone but himself. Most of what he said about the military has been said before: There’s no grand strategy, the Iraqi Army should not have been disbanded, there was no planning for stabilization or recovery past the initial invasion and, “the administration has failed.”

He said deployment cycles aren’t working with current troop levels, that it will take decades to fix the “military’s full-spectrum readiness,” and that if the U.S. were to withdraw from Iraq, it would lead to “chaos that would lead to instability in the Middle East.” And, he said the Powell Doctrine — which requires a clear exit strategy as part of a war plan — was violated.

He said some poor strategic decisions in Iraq had become “defeats because of the media,” and that some reporters feed from a “pigs’ trough.” He lamented the media’s treatment of Federal Emergency Management chief Michael Brown during Hurricane Katrina. Brown resigned from FEMA after accusations that he had mishandled the hurricane.

This is especially bizarre:

When asked for specific names involved in failures he cited, he said, “I’m not into second-guessing decisions of our political leadership.”

From reading Fiasco and Cobra II, I got the impression that Sanchez was “a micromanager with a conventional warfare mentality” and very much the wrong man for the job. Presumably, appointing Sanchez is part of the long list of things the administration did wrong in carrying out this war.

Update (Dave Schuler)

Here is the complete text of Gen. Sanchez’s speech. I didn’t take quite the same thing away from the speech as the NYT apparently did. Criticism of the Bush Administration’s conduct of the war? Sure. But I think the emphasis is more on a “unity of effort”, impossible with an antagonistic press:

America has sent our soldiers off to war and they must be supported at all costs until we achieve victory or until our political leaders decide to bring them home. Our political and military leaders owe the soldier on the battlefield the strategy, the policies and the resources to win once committed to war. America has not been fully committed to win this war. as the military commanders on the ground have stated since the summer of 2003, the U.S. military alone cannot win this war. America must mobilize the interagency and the political and economic elements of power, which have been abject failures to date, in order to achieve victory. Our nation has not focused on the greatest challenge of our lifetime. The political and economic elements of power must get beyond the politics to ensure the survival of america. Partisan politics have hindered this war effort and America should not accept this. America must demand a unified national strategy that goes well beyond partisan politics and places the common good above all else. too often our politicians have chosen loyalty to their political party above loyalty to the constitution because of their lust for power. Our politicians must remember their oath of office and recommit themselves to serving our nation and not their own self-interests or political party. The security of america is at stake and we can accept nothing less. anything short of this is unquestionably dereliction of duty.

McClatchy Newspapers is running a story with the headline “Bush astounds activists, supports human rights.” Here’s the lede:

President Bush implored the United Nations on Tuesday to recommit itself to restoring human decency by liberating oppressed people and ending famine and disease.

Speaking before the United Nations General Assembly, the president called for renewed efforts to enforce the U.N.’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a striking point of emphasis for a leader who’s widely accused of violating human rights in waging war against terrorism.

Bush didn’t mention the U.S. prisons in Afghanistan or at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, the U.S. practice of holding detainees for years without legal charges or access to lawyers, or the CIA’s “rendition” kidnappings of suspects abroad, all issues of concern to human rights activists around the world.

“At first read, it’s little more than an exercise in hypocrisy. His words about human rights ring hollow because his credibility is nonexistent,” said Curt Goering, the deputy executive director of Amnesty International USA. “The gap between the rhetoric and the actual record is stunning. I can’t help but believe many people in the audience were thinking, ‘What was this man thinking?’ “

Seriously?

I’ve long argued against the use of torture for terrorist suspects and for affording at least minimal due process rights for detainees at Gitmo and elsewhere. Some of these policies are morally and legally dubious and all of them are, in my view, counterproductive.

The United States is fighting wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. It’s allowed to take prisoners under international law. There is quite a bit of ambiguity, though, in the treatment of combatants who fight without identifying uniforms and insignia and who illegally use the non-combatant civilian population for cover.

For the most part, the United States is complying with international law and affording these people the treatment normally reserved for legitimate prisoners of war. While the abuses at Abu Ghraib were arguably made more likely by policies at Guantanamo and elsewhere, they were nonetheless crimes and treated as such. The courts have, too slowly in my view, dealt with the due process issues.

But, my word, what kind of hack news organization can’t see the distinction between those things and the mass genocide of Darfur? Can a leader not simultaneously believe that extraordinary measures are necessary to protect his people from a very real enemy and yet oppose slaughter, oppression, and famine?

Peter Singer, who write his Kennedy School dissertation on mercenaries and has since cornered the market on that niche, has an interesting piece at Defense Tech noting that Congress has closed the loophole that made war zone contractors all but unaccountable for criminal acts.

Over the last few years, tales of private military contractors run amuck in Iraq — from the CACI interrogators at Abu Ghraib to the Aegis company’s Elvis-themed internet “trophy video” —- have continually popped up in the headlines. Unfortunately, when it came to actually doing something about these episodes of Outsourcing Gone Wild, Hollywood took more action than Washington. The TV series Law and Order punished fictional contractor crimes, while our courts ignored the actual ones. Leonardo Dicaprio acted in a movie featuring the private military industry, while our government enacted no actual policy on it. But those carefree days of military contractors romping across the hills and dales of the Iraqi countryside, without legal status or accountability, may be over. The Congress has struck back.

Amidst all the add-ins, pork spending, and excitement of the budget process, it has now come out that a tiny clause was slipped into the Pentagon’s fiscal year 2007 budget legislation. The one sentence section (number 552 of a total 3510 sections) states that “Paragraph (10) of section 802(a) of title 10, United States Code (article 2(a) of the Uniform Code of Military Justice), is amended by striking `war’ and inserting `declared war or a contingency operation’.” The measure passed without much notice or any debate. And then, as they might sing on School House Rock, that bill became a law (P.L.109-364).

The addition of five little words to a massive US legal code that fills entire shelves at law libraries wouldn’t normally matter for much. But with this change, contractors’ ‘get out of jail free’ card may have been torn to shreds. Previously, contractors would only fall under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, better known as the court martial system, if Congress declared war. This is something that has not happened in over 65 years and out of sorts with the most likely operations in the 21st century. The result is that whenever our military officers came across episodes of suspected contractor crimes in missions like Bosnia, Kosovo, Iraq, or Afghanistan, they had no tools to resolve them. As long as Congress had not formally declared war, civilians — even those working for the US armed forces, carrying out military missions in a conflict zone — fell outside their jurisdiction. The military’s relationship with the contractor was, well, merely contractual. At most, the local officer in charge could request to the employing firm that the individual be demoted or fired. If he thought a felony occurred, the officer might be able to report them on to civilian authorities.

Much more detail at the link. Like Kevin Drum and Hilzoy, I welcome the move. Given that 1) the military increasingly contracts out crucial roles in combat zones and 2) we no longer “declare” wars, even when Congress signs off on them, it stands to reason that DoD contractors should be subject to the same rules as soldiers.

Hilzoy believes this move is “wonderful, and long overdue.”

It’s good not only for the rule of law, the general moral character of the cosmos, and our national honor; it’s also good for the military. Most of the books about the war in Iraq that I’ve read are full of stories of contractors doing all sorts of appalling things, not necessarily because they are bad people, but because they have been hired for a specific job (like, say, keeping a given person safe), and rather understandably focus on that and not on, say, protecting American interests, or not making people absolutely hate Americans, or even fitting in in the most obvious ways with ongoing military operations. If their job is to keep a given person safe, and if that requires shooting Iraqis who get too close to them, or barreling across a crowded sidewalk in a Hummer, or whatever, then that’s what they will do. At least now there will be some limits on their conduct.

Singer notes, though, that there are plenty of potential unintended consequences:

[T]he scope of the new law could made more clear; it could be either too limited or too wide, depending on the interpretation. While it is apparent that any military contractor working directly or indirectly for the US military falls under the change, it is unclear whether those doing similar jobs for other US government agencies in the same warzone would fall under it as well (recalling that the contractors at Abu Ghraib were technically employed by the US Department of Interior, sublet out to DOD).

On the opposite side, what about civilians who have agreed to be embedded, but not contracted? The Iraq war is the first that journalists could formally embed in units, so there is not much experience with its legal side in contingency operations. The lack of any legal precedent, combined with the new law, could mean that an overly aggressive interpretation might now also include journalists who have embedded.

One wonders, too, about the Geneva Convention and other international law implications of this. Does this make contractors engaged in military roles de jure as well as de facto combatants?

While I have strong misgivings about contracting out security and interrogation operations, there is no end in sight to that trend. We need, therefore, to figure out how to deal with it.

The Bush administration is considering li

The Bush administration has drafted amendments to a war crimes law that would eliminate the risk of prosecution for political appointees, CIA officers and former military personnel for humiliating or degrading war prisoners, according to U.S. officials and a copy of the amendments. Officials say the amendments would alter a U.S. law passed in the mid-1990s that criminalized violations of the Geneva Conventions, a set of international treaties governing military conduct in wartime. The conventions generally bar the cruel, humiliating and degrading treatment of wartime prisoners without spelling out what all those terms mean. The draft U.S. amendments to the War Crimes Act would narrow the scope of potential criminal prosecutions to 10 specific categories of illegal acts against detainees during a war, including torture, murder, rape and hostage-taking.

While it makes sense to change the law to ensure that government employees carrying out their assigned duties are not subject to criminal prosecution for so doing, this would be a tragic mistake.

The problem is not that existing law is too strict but that the policy in question is wrongheaded. Following the Geneva Conventions is not only something the United States is obligated to do–indeed, the Constitution explicitly states that simple legislation can not override treaty commitments–but unquestionably in our own best interests.

Gary Farber gets it right:

Because if American power to engage in forced nakedness of prisoners, to put them on dog leashes and in women’s underwear isn’t preserved, god help the survival of our nation. And its ideals.

If America isn’t about putting people on dog leashes and in women’s underwear, what is it about?

Ironically, this comes from an administration that quite rightly ensured that the perpetrators of Abu Ghraib–although not their direct chain of command–were punished for dishonoring their uniform and setting back our cause in Iraq considerably. Hint: This is not helping.

Susie Madrak, meanwhile, sees a darker motive here: “The fact that they’re doing this now does seem to indicate they’re, oh, a little concerned about November’s midterms, doesn’t it?” Even in the crazy political climate we’re in, I don’t think they’re seriously worried about high level officials being prosecuted for exercising their judgment in national security matters.

UPDATE: In the comments below, Susie points to a May 2004 Newsweek story about a 2002 internal memo from then-WH Cousel Alberto Gonzales suggesting he was in fact worried about this possibility.

In the memo, the White House lawyer focused on a little known 1996 law passed by Congress, known as the War Crimes Act, that banned any Americans from committing war crimes—defined in part as “grave breaches” of the Geneva Conventions. Noting that the law applies to “U.S. officials” and that punishments for violators “include the death penalty,” Gonzales told Bush that “it was difficult to predict with confidence” how Justice Department prosecutors might apply the law in the future. This was especially the case given that some of the language in the Geneva Conventions—such as that outlawing “outrages upon personal dignity” and “inhuman treatment” of prisoners—was “undefined.”

Interesting. I’m sure I read that at the time, although there’s nothing in the blog archives about it, but I’d long forgotten it. Lawyers are paid to cover all the bases but, from a pure practical politics sense, I still believe my original assessment correct.

CNN BREAKING: Three members of the 101st Airborne Division are charged in connection with deaths of three detainees in Iraq, U.S. military says.

Reuters:

The U.S. military said on Monday three U.S. soldiers had been charged in the deaths of three male prisoners on May 9. It said the soldiers faced charges including “murder, attempted murder, conspiracy, communicating a threat, and obstructing justice.” It was not clear whether all three faced the murder charge. “Three members of 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 101st Airborne Division have been charged in connection with the deaths of three male detainees,” the U.S. military said in a statement.

Ugh. A few malicious idiots continue to hand the enemy major propaganda victories.

UPDATE: AP/NYT:

The U.S. Army has charged three soldiers in connection with the deaths of three Iraqis who were in military custody in southern Iraq last month, the military said Monday. The Multinational Corps-Iraq said three members of 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 101st Airborne Division have been charged in connection with the deaths of three male detainees during an operation near Thar Thar Canal in southern Salahuddin province on May 9.

”A noncommissioned officer and two soldiers each have been charged with violating several articles of the Uniform Code of Military Justice including murder, attempted murder, conspiracy, communicating a threat, and obstructing justice,” an announcement said. It added that ”on the day the alleged murders occurred, the unit commander ordered an inquiry to determine the circumstances surrounding the deaths of the three detainees.”

It said that a criminal investigation began May 17 and was ongoing. ”The soldiers are currently in pre-trial confinement awaiting an Article 32 hearing to determine if sufficient evidence exists for the case to be referred to court-martial,” the announcement said. Once charged, defendants have the right to an Article 32 hearing, the military equivalent of a grand jury investigation.

Last week, the Army said it had opened a criminal investigation into the suspicious deaths of three men in military custody in Iraq. The investigation was requested by Lt. Gen. Peter W. Chiarelli, commander of multinational forces in Iraq, who acted after other soldiers raised suspicions about the deaths.

Bithead may be right on this one. I had presumed “charged” meant that the Article 32 hearing had been conducted and decided courts martial were in order. At this stage, “under investigation” or “accused” rather than “charged” would be more appropriate language.

A Fort Meade, Maryland jury found dog handler Santos A. Cardona guilt of misconduct for his role in the Abu Ghraib prison scandal.

A military jury convicted an Army dog handler Thursday of abusing a prisoner at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Sgt. Santos A. Cardona was portrayed by prosecutors as part of a sadistic conspiracy and by defense lawyers as a victim of the chaos and confusion at Abu Ghraib.

Ten low-ranking soldiers, including Cardona’s fellow dog-handler Sgt. Michael Smith, previously were convicted in the Abu Ghraib scandal. According to testimony in their cases, detainees were abused and photographed in painful or sexually humiliating positions. Smith was sentenced to 179 days in prison.

Cardona was accused of using his military dog, Duco, to terrorize detainees for his own amusement. His civilian attorney, Harver J. Volzer, described him as a good soldier who tried to meet the urgent but muddled demands of inept senior officers. “This man did absolutely nothing wrong,” Volzer said in his closing argument Tuesday.

A military JAG would not have made that argument to a military jury. For good reason: Professional soldiers expect NCOs in the United States Army to exercise independent moral judgment.

Maj. Christopher Graveline, the lead prosecutor, discounted the defense theory that Cardona and other military police soldiers felt obliged to take orders from military intelligence workers outside their chain of command. “This is not about confusion and it’s not about military intelligence. They were doing their own thing for their own entertainment,” Graveline said.

Cardona, 32, of Fullerton, California, is accused of making his dog bite one prisoner and harass another to amuse himself and other soldiers already convicted of abuses at Abu Ghraib in late 2003 and early 2004. The government also alleges he competed with another dog handler to frighten detainees into soiling themselves.

No jury of soldiers would believe such conduct represented a professional military policeman’s honest judgment about the best way to interrogate prisoners.

See Iraq Prison Scandal Archives for related stories.

Mark Benjamin and Michael Scherer report in Salon.com that a staffer for Representative Mike Rogers has been reprimanded for his role in the Abu Ghraib prison scandal in his capacity as an Army Reserve captain.

Army Reserve Capt. Christopher Brinson, who supervised some of the military police prosecuted for abuse at Abu Ghraib. A senior staffer to a Republican congressman revealed Thursday that he has been formally reprimanded by the Army for his role in the Abu Ghraib detainee abuse scandal — and that he is fighting the disciplinary move. He says that higher-ups were responsible for the treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib.

U.S. Army Reserve Capt. Christopher R. Brinson, who in civilian life works as the deputy chief of staff for Alabama Republican Rep. Mike Rogers, was directly in charge of some of the military police later prosecuted for abuse at Abu Ghraib during the notorious autumn of 2003. Brinson received the reprimand in January 2005, but it had not been revealed publicly until his attorney, David P. Sheldon, confirmed it to Salon Thursday, noting that Brinson has since submitted a rebuttal to the Army. The attorney would not reveal the exact reason for Brinson’s punishment.

See the complete story, which was emailed to me by Salon, at OTB News.

The Salon piece does not give much information on Brinson’s role at Abu Ghraib but it appears that he was reprimanded for failure to exercise appropriate leadership in stopping some of the abuses. I have no strong opinion on whether that was in fact the case or, as he claims, he was placed in a position where he was essentially powerless.

Still, as a former Army officer myself, my view is that officers, especially company grade officers, have a responsibility to know what their subordinates are doing and to do whatever is necessary to enforce the code of conduct. Given how many things were going on at Abu Ghraib that violated not only every aspect of military norms but basic human decency, any junior officer or NCO stationed there has some culpability even by omission.

That said, he was only given a reprimand. While he likely did not do enough to enforce Army values, he apparently did exercise some leadership:

According to a handwritten log kept by the military police at the prison, obtained by Salon, Brinson may have dialed back abuse ordered in one instance by interrogators. A Nov. 14, 2003, entry notes an order to “strip out” and exercise six detainees. But those orders “were changed by Capt. Brinson,” Graner wrote. Instead, Brinson ordered that the detainees remain in their cells “in jumpsuits.”

In an April 2004 statement by Brinson to the CIA Office of the Inspector General, also obtained by Salon, Brinson admitted his role in the curious handling of Manadel al-Jamadi, a detainee who died during a CIA interrogation at Abu Ghraib in November 2003. The Armed Forces Institute of Pathology ruled al-Jamadi’s death a homicide, caused by “blunt force injuries complicated by compromised respiration.”

According to Brinson’s statement, because of his position of authority at Abu Ghraib, he was awakened early on Nov. 4, 2003, after al-Jamadi died during CIA interrogation in a shower at the prison. Brinson said he arrived in the shower at Abu Ghraib to find a nervous CIA interrogator who said, “This guy just died on us.” Brinson said al-Jamadi was lying on the ground face up with a bloody eye that Brinson was told could have come during an earlier struggle when al-Jamadi was captured. Brinson said he saw blood on the floor, according to the CIA report.

This matter is still under adjudication by the Army. Based on the Salon report, I see no indication that he has done anything that should cause him to lose his job with Rogers’ office. His conduct, while perhaps not living up to the highest callings of the military service, was apparently not enough to merit even nonjudicial punishment. And, I hasten to add, he did at least serve, something relatively few on the Hill can say.

I should note, in the interests of full disclosure, that Rogers is my parents’ congressman. I have met him a couple of times, because we are both alumni of Jacksonville State University, and found him to be incredibly gracious and likeable.

BREAKING NEWS: U.S. military to close Abu Ghraib prison and transfer prisoners to other jails in Iraq, CNN confirms.

No details yet but this is long overdue. While there were some practical reasons not to shut down a working prison at a time when housing prisoners was necessary, the symbolic value of Abu Ghraib to our enemies has been far, far more detrimental to our cause than whatever security it provided.

Update: Reuters has details:

The U.S. military will close Abu Ghraib prison, probably within three months, and transfer some 4,500 prisoners to other jails in Iraq, a military spokesman said on Thursday.

The prison in western Baghdad was a torture center under Saddam Hussein before photographs of American soldiers abusing Iraqis there in 2003 gave it a new notoriety and made it a touchstone for Arab and Muslim rage over the U.S. occupation.

“We will transfer operations from Abu Ghraib to the new Camp Cropper once construction is completed there,” Lieutenant Colonel Keir-Kevin Curry told Reuters.

“No precise dates have been set, but the plan is to accomplish this within the next two to three months,” said Curry, the spokesman for U.S. detention operations in Iraq.

Rusty Shackleford posts a large number of photos of prisoners being abused and even murdered in Iraq that, unlike the Abu Ghraib photos, have not seen the light of day in the mainstream press.

The United Nations has issued a call for the United States to either try or release the prisoners at Guantánamo.

A United Nations report today called on the United States to immediately close the detention center for suspected terrorists at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and to either release its inmates or bring them to trial. The report, by a team of five inspectors for the United Nations Human Rights Commission in Geneva, blasted the American government for a litany of abuses, and said that certain practices at the prison camp “must be assessed as amounting to torture.”

The American ambassador who acts as a liaison to the Human Rights Commission, Keven E. Maloney, rejected the report’s findings in a letter that was included with it. He said the inspectors began by concluding that abuses existed, and that the report “selectively includes only those factual assertions needed to support those conclusions and ignores other facts that would undermine those conclusions.” Mr. Maloney also criticized the inspectors for rejecting an invitation to visit the camp, which was created on a former naval base in early 2002 to house suspected terrorists captured during the invasion of Afghanistan that followed the Sept. 11th attacks. The camp holds about 500 prisoners. The inspectors said in the report that they had turned down the invitation because they would not have been able to meet privately with detainees.

The prison camp has long been the subject of criticism, both from human rights activists and from many European countries. Germany’s chancellor, Angela Merkel, raised the issue in a White House meeting with President Bush last month, and described if afterward as one on which there had been “differences of opinion.” President Bush defended the camp as a necessary part of the war against terror.

Speaking in London before the release of the report, the United Nation’s high commissioner for human rights, Louise Arbour, told the BBC that said she could not endorse every recommendation it contained, but that she could see little alternative to closing down the facility.

The report was based on interviews with former inmates and their lawyers, public documents, media reports and on written answers provided by American officials. It focused in particular on the force-feeding of inmates on conducting hunger strikes, which is said was both a violation of human rights and of medical ethics, and of the use of interrogation techniques that go beyond what international law permits. “The confusion with regard to authorized and unauthorized interrogation techniques is particularly alarming,” it said.

AP’s Sam Cage adds,

Although the investigators did not visit Guantanamo, they said photographic evidence and the testimonies of former prisoners showed detainees were shackled, chained, hooded and forced to wear earphones and goggles. They said prisoners were beaten if they resisted. “Such treatment amounts to torture,” the report said. Some interrogation techniques — particularly the use of dogs, exposure to extreme temperatures, sleep deprivation for several consecutive days and prolonged isolation — caused extreme suffering, the report said.

It also concluded that the particular status of Guantanamo Bay under the international lease agreement between the United States and Cuba did not limit Washington’s obligations under international human rights law toward those detained there.

Many of the allegations have been made before, but the document represented the first inquiry launched by the 53-nation U.N. Human Rights Commission, the world body’s top rights watchdog. The five investigators, who come from Argentina, Austria, New Zealand, Algeria and Pakistan, were appointed by the commission to the three-year project. They worked independently and received no payment, though the U.N. covered expenses. The U.S., which is a member of the commission, has criticized the body itself for including members with poor human rights records.

The camp has been a public relations disaster for the United States and it is not entirely clear what useful purpose it continues to serve. While al Qaeda operatives captured in Afghanistan are not ordinary enemy prisoners of war entitled to the protections of the Geneva Conventions, simply arresting people and shipping them off to prison camps is contrary to both international law and U.S. precedent.

That said, the report’s credibility is diminished by relying principally on allegations made by sworn enemies of the United States. The commissioners certainly should have visited the camp and talked with prisoners and officials there before writing their report.

Salon has published a new gallery of photos of prisoners being abused at Abu Ghraib. These go along with the batch published by the British and Australian media yesterday.

The AP offers this description:

New images of naked prisoners, some bloodied and lying on the floor, threatened to revive public anger over abuse by U.S. guards at Abu Ghraib prison at a time when tensions with the West are already running high in the Middle East. The images were taken about the same time as the earlier photos that triggered a worldwide scandal and led to military trials and prison sentences for several lower-ranking American soldiers. Some key Iraqi officials urged their countrymen Wednesday to react calmly since the pictures were old and the offenders had been punished. Many of the pictures broadcast Wednesday by Australia’s Special Broadcasting Service, including some that appear to show corpses, were more graphic than those previously published. One of the video clips depicted a group of naked men with bags over their heads standing together and masturbating. The network said the men were forced to participate.

In the Middle East, where there have been widespread anti-Western protests recently over caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad, Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya TV aired some of the Australian station’s footage but refrained from using the most shocking and sexually explicit images. CNN also broadcast excerpts. Iraq’s acting human rights minister, Nermine Othman, said she was “horrified” by the pictures and would study whether any action could be taken against those responsible, even though some offenders have been imprisoned. “There will be two kinds of reactions from Iraqis,” she told The Associated Press. “One will be anger and others will feel sorry that they (SBS) didn’t give them to the Iraqi government to investigate. Why use them? Why show them? We have had enough suffering and we don’t want any more.”

Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said the Defense Department believed the release of additional images of prisoner abuse was harmful and “could only further inflame and possibly incite unnecessary violence in the world.” Whitman said he did not know whether the photos and video clips were among images the Pentagon has been withholding from public release since 2004. But another defense official said Army officials had reviewed the photographs posted on the Sydney Morning Herald’s Web site and matched them to images that were among those turned over to military authorities in 2004 by a U.S. soldier.

Michelle Malkin asks, reasonably enough,

No pixelation of the nude prisoners in the photos. No disclaimers about paying respect to members of the US military who will be endangered by publication of the pics. The Washington Post used the opportunity to republish Abu Ghraib photos and video it obtained in April 2004.

Readers have been e-mailing all day the question the MSM needs to answer:

Why the Abu Ghraib photos, but not the Mohammed Cartoons?

Fair enough. Of course, given that Malkin and I are among the numerous bloggers who have published the Mohammed cartoons, one supposes the counter charge could be made. So, here are three of the most graphic from the Salon portfolio:

Salon’s Walter Shapiro offers an explanation for “Why we’re publishing the new Abu Ghraib photos.”

Eventually this visual repetition numbs the senses. All these ghastly images have been viewed so often that they seem to belong to a different war conducted by a different superpower in a different century. Yet the photographs that news organizations have so far published represent only a partial sample of the government’s chilling documentary record from Abu Ghraib.

When Salon’s national correspondent Mark Benjamin obtained the never-before-released photographs that accompany this essay, we had to both establish their authenticity and to answer the basic question of our justification for publishing. The images themselves partly answered the why-publish question for us. Speaking for myself, I remain haunted by one of the more seemingly banal pictures in this new collection from the dark side. Taken on Dec. 6, 2003, the photograph shows a uniformed and seemingly untroubled Army sergeant leaning against a corridor wall completing his paperwork. All routine, except standing next to the sergeant is a hooded and naked Iraqi prisoner. Just another day of methodical record-keeping at Abu Ghraib.

[...]

Abu Ghraib cannot be allowed to fade away like some half-forgotten domestic political controversy, which may have prompted newsmagazine covers at the time, but now seems as irrelevant as the 2002 elections. Abu Ghraib is not an issue of partisan sound bites or refighting the decision to invade Iraq. Grotesque violations of every value that America proclaims occurred within the walls of that prison. These abuses were carried out by soldiers who wore our flag on their uniforms and apparently believed that Americans here at home would approve of their conduct. Rather than hiding what they did out of shame, they commemorated their sadism with a visual record.

Salon is a media organization and additional photos are news. They’re also a left-of-center publication that opposed the war and this administration and it serves their ideological agenda. Why they were published really needs no explanation. They’re certainly within their rights to do so.

I question, however, the assertion that more pictures of the same thing proves that something is more pervasive or systematic. The American soldiers pictured appear to be the same ones that we’ve already seen pictured and tried for their crimes. That they took a whole bunch of photos rather than a few doesn’t really add much to the story.

Update: Matt at Blackfive has more graphic photos from Abu Ghraib, including this horrific shot:

Shocking!

Senators Lindsey Graham and Carl Leven have reached across the aisle to forge a compromise bill that would give limited judicial rights to those accused of terrorism, including a reiteration of existing policy against torture.

Senators Agree on Detainee Rights (WaPo, A1)

A bipartisan group of senators reached a compromise yesterday that would dramatically alter U.S. policy for treating captured terrorist suspects by granting them a final recourse to the federal courts but stripping them of some key legal rights. The compromise links legislation written by Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), which would deny detainees broad access to federal courts, with a new measure authored by Sen. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.) that would grant detainees the right to appeal the verdict of a military tribunal to a federal appeals court. The deal will come to a vote today, and the authors say they are confident it will pass.

Graham and Levin indicated they would then demand that House and Senate negotiators link their measure with the effort by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) to clearly ban torture and abuse of terrorism suspects being held in U.S. facilities. “McCain’s amendment needs to be part of the overall package, because it deals with standardizing interrogation techniques and will reestablish moral high ground for the United States,” Graham said.

Such broad legislation would be Congress’s first attempt to assert some control over the detention of suspected terrorists, which the Bush administration has closely guarded as its sole prerogative. By linking a provision to deny prisoners the right to challenge their detention in federal court with language restricting interrogation methods, senators hope to soften the administration’s ardent opposition to McCain’s anti-torture provision — or possibly win its support.

The Justice and Defense departments have expressed strong support for legislation that would curtail a flurry of civil litigation coming out of the military’s detention camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, according to some senators involved in the negotiation. “The truth is, this is something the administration would dearly like,” Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.) said of the language curtailing detainee access to the courts.

But Vice President Cheney, a major architect of the U.S. anti-terrorism effort, is strongly opposed to any compromise that includes the McCain provision, the senators said. Cheney personally lobbied against McCain’s measure to ban abuse and torture, contending that its language was too broad and would prohibit the use of interrogation methods necessary to secure vital national security information. After the Senate approved the measure as part of a defense spending bill, he pushed to exempt the CIA from its provisions.

While I share Cheney’s concern about the possibility of congressional micromanagement in national security matters, setting the policy parameters within which the executive may operate is very much Congress’ prerogative, if not their duty. It is the job of the president and the professional bureaucracies he leads to execute public policy and that of the legislature to establish it.

Rick Moran adds some useful information and insights:

It has been a national disgrace that the detainees have been held these past 3 years with their legal status up in the air. The situation was complicated unnecessarily last year when the courts ruled that detainees had a right to a hearing on their status. The resulting flood of motions – both frivolous and serious – became a nightmare for the Justice Department and DoD who had been asking Congress to clarify what rights the detainees had in this unique legal situation. The fact that both the Administration and the Republican Congress took their own sweet time in addressing the issue only gave our international foes an opening in the propaganda war.

The compromise neatly addresses the concerns of DoD in that intelligence gained from interrogations as well as the way certain information on individual terrorists was obtained either through “National Technical Means” (eavesdropping, spy satellites, etc.) or through informants will not be used in open court by activist lawyers seeking to undermine our intelligence capabilities in the War on Terror. The bill will also give the Justice Department some guidance on how to proceed with the appeals process. And incorporating some form of the McCain bill will standardize the the Army Field Manual techniques for interrogating prisoners thus putting the nation on record that it opposes the kind of interrogations that have led to more than 400 investigations by DoD into accusations of abuse with 230 determinations that have resulted in either reprimands or court martials.

hilzoy provides PDF links to the amendments in question. Even after reading them, though, he’s not sure he understands them:

I can’t tell you how frustrating it is to have done as much as possible to research this issue, which has such a huge effect on hundreds of people’s lives and on what kind of country the United States will be, and to not even really understand what these bills mean on the day before the Senate votes on them. I went to law school, and have very smart people who know a lot about this issue trying to explain this to me, and I still feel like I’ve wandered into this scene. As Judge Joyce Hens Green said of Moustafa Idr’s trial, it would be funny if the stakes weren’t so horribly high.

Norbizness provides a “Cliff’s Notes version,” replete with sarcastic commentary.

Hugh Hewitt, on the other hand, contends,

The proposed Senate resolution is an unmistakable vot-of-no-confidence in the Adminsitration, and the best gift the United States Senate could give Zarqawi and his terrorist ranks. It is almost incomprehensible that Senate Republicans could see this in any other fashion.

One could argue that the perception that the United States is a nation that tortures its prisoners and practices other than what it’s preaching in the Middle East about the rule of law plays into Zarqawi’s hands, too. But that would, apparently, be tantamount to treason.

Hugh cites a post from Pam Spaulding at Pandagon as proof of his position.

Cat Killer Frist and John Warner of Virginia want to get their party out of the vortex sucking down the Chimp and are moving, with a non-binding resolution, to solidify their position with the equivalent of a no-confidence vote on Bush’s Iraq policy.

One could argue, contrarily, that keeping the party of of a vortex is a good thing but that, too, plays into the hands of the terrorists enemy Democrats.

Ed Morrissey, apparently a Democrat pinko mole, takes a similarly pro-terrorist, anti-American position:

It isn’t unreasonable to have Congress call for some accounting from the White House on the status of Iraq, given the 150,000 troops currently deployed on a police mission there. It doesn’t have to be a net negative for Bush to come to the Senate to present his side of the story; as the events this past week have shown, the President can use that kind of platform to correct many distortions of his record and the state of the effort in Iraq. Given the frustration many in the GOP feel with the White House in communicating all the good that our intervention has created, it sounds like a very good idea indeed, one that might be cast as a long-overdue bullhorn.

Of course, if individual Republicans, including elected United States Senators, are allowed to think for themselves, the next thing you know we’ll have anarchy.

Update: Alex Tabarrok, Kevin Drum, and Megan McArdle all agree that torture is a bad thing but that it might nonetheless be used under the most dire circumstances.

Tabarrok:

By making torture illegal we are raising the price of torture but we are not raising the price to infinity. If the President or the head of the CIA thinks that torture is required to stop the ticking time bomb then they ought to approve it knowing full well that they face possible prosecution. Only if the price of torture is very high can we expect that it will be used only in the most absolutely urgent of circumstances.

Drum:

[I]n the fantastically unlikely 24-esque event that we capture a terrorist who knows the location of a ticking atomic bomb, he’s going to get tortured regardless. The torturer will immediately get pardoned by the president for doing so, and would be unanimously acquitted by a jury even if he weren’t. And I’m fine with that.

McArdle:

I’ve long endorsed Glenn Reynolds’ take on the torture question: if there really is a ticking nuclear bomb in New York City, and the CIA gets hold of a guy who can tell them what they want to know, they’re going to torture it out of him whether torture is legal or not.

Sadly, even in the case of a ticking time bomb, there’s little evidence that torture actually works at gaining accurate information. People will confess to just about anything to stop the pain. And people willing to murder innocents are certainly willing to lie to do so.

Related: Truth Extraction: Honey Beats Vinegar