The report clearing General Sanchez and other top brass of responsibility in the Abu Ghraib prison scandal shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone. That is, unless you believe Major Generals have the time and inclination to participate in fraternity style pranks and hazing:
Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, who became the senior commander in Iraq in June 2003, two months after the fall of Baghdad, had been faulted in earlier investigations for leadership lapses that may have contributed to prisoner abuse. He is the highest ranking officer to face official allegations of leadership failures in Iraq, but he has not been accused of criminal violations.After assessing the allegations against Sanchez and taking sworn statements from 37 people involved in Iraq, the Army’s inspector general, Lt. Gen. Stanley E. Green, concluded that the allegations were unsubstantiated, said the officials who were familiar with the details of Green’s probe.
Green reached the same conclusion in the cases of two generals and a colonel who worked for Sanchez
Only the most willfully self deluded among us believed the hysterical denunciations and wild charges being made by the President’s opponents in politics and the media. Did you really believe these cretins care one whit about the poor Iraqi terrorists and criminals who were the victims of juvenile hazing rituals and demeaning sexual game playing? Or is it more likely that the President, riding a wave of popular support for his strong leadership in the war on terror, needed to be smeared with wild headlines and false charges of complicity in order to defeat his reelection bid?
The “torture as national policy meme” was bogus from the start. Here’s a summary of nearly two years of inquiry by both Army and civilian investigators:
Barring new evidence, the inquiry, by the Army’s inspector general, effectively closes the Army’s book on whether the highest-ranking officers in Iraq during the Abu Ghraib prison scandal should be held accountable for command failings described in past reviews.Only one of the top five officers, whose roles the Senate Armed Services Committee had asked the Army to review, has received any punishment. That officer, Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, an Army Reserve officer who commanded the military police unit at the Abu Ghraib prison, was relieved of her command and given a written reprimand. She has repeatedly said she was made the scapegoat for the failures of superiors.
The findings, which provoked outrage from some civil rights groups and Democratic aides, came nearly a year after shocking photographs of American military police officers stacking naked Iraqi prisoners in a human pyramid and of other abuses first telecast nationally. Shortly afterward, an internal Army report chronicled the virtual collapse of the command structure at Abu Ghraib, outside Baghdad, in the fall of 2003.
So far, only a small number of soldiers, mostly from the enlisted ranks, have faced courts-martial for their actions at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere. Dozens of others have faced administrative discipline for abusing captives at other detention sites and battlefield interrogation stations across Iraq.
The facts are clear. Now the only line of attack left to the President’s political foes is the spurious charge of “whitewash:”
But some Democratic aides on Capitol Hill, civil rights groups and lawyers for lower-ranking soldiers who have been disciplined voiced dismay on Friday at the findings, which they said would fuel the perception that the Army was trying to protect its senior leaders at the expense of junior officers and enlisted soldiers.Democratic aides, who along with their Republican counterparts were briefed this week on the Army inquiry’s findings, said Friday that they disagreed with the conclusions and would review the full investigation before determining their next step.
In other words, the Democratic aides need to figure out what else they can do to try and keep the “scandal” alive in the press and in front of the public. Never mind that they’re undermining the efforts of the military to win in Iraq. Never mind that every time the New York Times publishes another story from some Iraqi who says he was beaten or abused by those sex-crazed American female GI’s that it inflames the “Arab street” against what we’re trying to accomplish in that part of the world. These things don’t matter when placed against their overarching goal of politically damaging the President.
Great bunch of Americans, what?
The pitifully few cases of actual torture have been proven to be due to the employment of psychopaths and sadists in both the army and intelligence services; a black mark on those institutions but in no way reflective of the heroic efforts of the overwhelming majority of professional interrogators who’ve done a tremendous job under the most difficult circumstances imaginable.
And even though this investigation exonerates the government of any kind of involvement in “creating the climate” in which either torture or the prankish, unprofessional behavior at Abu Gharaib could be carried out, I personally am sick of the whole damn story and just wish we could move on to better things.
You can crawl back home
Say you were wrong
Stand out in the yard
And cry all night long
Go ahead and water the lawn
My give a damn’s busted
(chorus)
I really wanna care
I wanna feel something
Let me dig a little deeper
No, sorry…nothing
Cross Posted at Blogger News Network
8:21 am
Senior Officers Cleared in Abu Ghraib
The U.S. Army inspector general has cleared senior officers in conneciton with Abu Ghraib, the Washington Post reports:
The only Army general
11:12 am
Interesting the kinds of gymnastic extremes your average right-wing nutjob will go to grace the ass of power with its eager little nose. That the generals the author of this crap so obviously dreams of with unholy intent purportedly had no idea of what those in their charge were up to makes them culpable in these wretched events. Of course, the refusal of authority to recognize its responsibilities is a hallmark of the Baby Bush era, and nobody should be at all surprised at this obvious whitewash.
11:56 am
Saturday Lunch 4/23/05: phish and chips
Try one of these specials with your breakfast:
4:26 pm
Rightwing Nuthouse. Kind of says it all.
4:29 pm
Oh my! You’re the first person WHO EVER SAID THAT!
Whew! I guess I’m doing something right. Pissing off liberal loons is fun!
5:54 am
The notion that a General or even a field grade officer would be privvy to this stuff occuring is highly unlikely. The idea that intelligence personnel would delegate the task of demeaning prisoners to ARNG MPs, to “soften them up”, is even stupider. However, something is wrong if the only people convicted are junior enlisted soldiers. Where were their supervisors? Something beaten into the head of every leader, from ROTC until commissioning, and beyond, is that, as a leader, you are responsible for everything your unit does or fails to do – the good, the bad, and the ugly.
9:44 am
That officers in charge of prisons such as Abu Ghraib would not know that people in their command were torturing Iraqi prisoners on a fairly regular basis is inconceivable. To say that would be tantamount to saying nobody was watching the shop, which should at least have led to a dereliction of duty charge for some brass-hatted no load. They’d have to be either rank incompetents or drunks for such disastrous behavior on the part of enlisted personnel supposedly under their command to occur.
You’d have to be an inmate in a Rightwing Nuthouse to believe otherwise.
Question: Is Super Hawk really Jeff Gannon? I read this on another blog. That he would have gone from being White House executive butt attendant to the host(ess) of an enterprise as feeble as this one is interesting to say the least. Oh how the mighty have fallen!
10:22 am
Maybe it’s just me, but I seem to recall one General Karpinski who was fired and reprimanded for her lax oversight and discipline at the jail.
Not being an idiot liberal, I can’t understand why punishing more than one general would somehow either improve discipline or satisfy the bloodlust that you and other moonbat doinkbloomers seem to have.
If you’d just admit that the scalp you’re after is the commander in chief’s rather than carrying on this charade that you care one iota about the troops or those poor, put upon islamic terrorists you may be more believable. As it is, your faux outrage rings pretty hollow when you consider that, if we use your logic (placing blame on people higher up the chain of command to satisfy your fake sense of responsibility)perhaps we could’ve held Bill Clinton responsible for the numerous indictments involving his staff and cabinet. But then, Bill had his own problems, didn’t he.
As for the curious crack about Jeff Gannon, if you click on the “About” link in the sidebar, you’ll see that not to be the case. Your obsession with homosexuality suggests you haven’t quite come out of the closet yet. I urge you to do so. I’ve heard its a very liberating experience.
Say hi to your boyfriends at DU for me.
11:03 am
Carnival of the Vanities #136 – Blogger Refugee Edition
Welcome to the #136 Edition of the Carnival of the Vanities. This weeks edition is brought to you by your local coffeehouse, because nothing says misanthropy better than a local coffee house (particularly if it only brews fair-trade coffee). Next week …
11:09 am
Carnival of the Vanities #136 – Blogger Refugee Edition
Welcome to the #136 Edition of the Carnival of the Vanities. This weeks edition is brought to you by your local coffeehouse, because nothing says misanthropy better than a local coffee house (particularly if it only brews fair-trade coffee). Next week …
5:57 am
genital-herpes
ABU GHRAIB: “MY …