Taguba’s report on Abu Ghraib included rape and sodomy; yet now he says he saw no pictures of that.

No. Certain commentators have twisted his comments. He verified that what he told the Daily Telegraph was true. But his comments re rape, etc. pertained to the Abu Ghraib photos he saw, not the 2000 or so that are susceptible to release from the ACLU lawsuit.

From Salon’s 5/30 article by Mark Benjamin:

“The photographs in that lawsuit, I have not seen,” Taguba told Salon Friday night. The actual quote in the Telegraph was accurate, Taguba said — but he was referring to the hundreds of images he reviewed as an investigator of the abuse at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq — not the photos of abuse that Obama is seeking to suppress.

Taguba’s report on Abu Ghraib included rape and sodomy; yet now he says he saw no pictures of that.

I am mother of a daughter and have grand-daughters. Words cannot describe what these pictures do to me. I’ve always thought that I could not kill, but if that were my child…yes, I could…and maybe if the victim were a complete stranger.

Being an officer is NOT the same as being a factory manager. In the military, subordinates can’t quit if they don’t like their orders. They have to do what they are told or go to jail (or be hanged or shot, in extreme cases). As you go down the chain of command, subordinates have less and less independent decision-making authority, so their responsibility is reduced proportionally. Responsibility floats to the top, with command authority.

For example, historically, when a ship runs aground, its captain generally loses his command. Did he cause the grounding? Did he have all the knowledge necessary to avoid it? Probably not, in many if not most cases. But he will be court martialled, nonetheless, and generally convicted and punished for dereliction of duty. That is the burden of command.

When officers will not shoulder this level of responsibility, they have no business commanding others in battle. Indeed, those others are much less likely to follow.

my question is: where is rumskull’s sorry ass in the midst of all of these pretend-to-be-investigations of torture?

his bloody fingerprints are on EVERY BLOODY FUCKING STINKING THING!!! And yet he is never held accountable for ANYTHING.

You want to know whats wrong with the media politics in Washington, THINK RUMSFELD.

i bet if he alone was investigated that he would be deeply connected to dozens of monolithic illegal activities.

One of the disturbing trends under the Bush/Cheyney/Rumsfeld regime was the deliberate muddling of established roles and missions and formal chains of command. Special forces rather than regular forces. Joint Command Centers rather than normal service hierarchy. The White House and DoD going around the Joint Chiefs.

“Flexibility” and “transformation” were the justifications. But the reality–and the reason why US branches of service traditionally resist this sort of thing–is that it obscures and dilutes command responsibility. It makes it easier for the political leadership–the Commander in Chief–to blame problems on the generals, who blame it on the colonels, and so on down the line until the buck stops at Abu Ghraib sargeants and PFCs. It makes it easier to bypass ranking career professionals who insist on regulations in favor of more compliant, politically ambitious junior officers who will do anything for advancement (like Ollie North).

Military operations are not supposed to be deniable. This is part of the checks and balances that insure the legitimacy of orders. It is the guarantee that we give service men and women when they agree to do what they are told and risk life and limb. As I understand it, when a service man or woman doubts the authenticity, legality, or sanity of an order, he or she has a right and duty to query the chain of command. Every level in the hierarchy has to respond by vouching for the order. This insures that the order is real, that it has been thought through and reviewed, and that the officers responsible for originating or disseminating it are on record if anything goes wrong.

Clearly, the Bush/Cheyney/Rumsfeld military organization was intended to shield the higher ups from the consequences of their orders. Which is why I think it is vital that we punish those that collaborated–like McChrystal–and reward those that queried orders, refused, or retired rather than collude with the White House.

It won’t fly. Neither does McChrystal’s whining about his unhappiness with Rumsfeld’s approval of torture techniques.

Levin must know McChrystal is lying. I wish I were able to listen to or follow these hearings more closely. As it is, I must thank Spencer and the other commenters for keeping me up to date on this important, but little covered, event.

Part of the whole concept of a chain of command in which those above give orders to those below is to concentrate responsibility at the TOP of of the hierarchy, not at the bottom. An officer of McChrystal’s standing has a well-defined duty to know what happens under his command and, if something escapes him, to accept full responsibility for it. Not knowing about the actions of subordinates is not an excuse or a mitigation. It is, rather, tantamount to dereliction of duty.

American military law demands that a soldier refuse to obey an illegal order and specifically outlaws cruel or degrading treatment of prisoners. All military personnel are trained to know this. Being “uncomfortable” and going along is not a substitute for correct behavior. Nor is it a mitigation: such discomfort surely indicates consciousness of illegality.

Given the above, it seems obvious that McChrystal should not be advanced in any way. On the contrary, he should at best be retired at grade, if not demoted.

The fact that the counterinsurgency community in the services backs McChrystal so enthusistically is just another reason for making an example of him–CoIn is likely to be the future of our military for some time to come, and, historically, depends heavily on intelligence collection and policing tactics. In Iraq and Afghanistan, its practitioners are thus implicated in the torture scandals almost by definition.

Getting anywhere near the mistreatment of prisoners and non-combatants has to be the kiss of death for a military career if we are to ever get the Rumsfeld rot excised from the military. Some will say morale will suffer. I say that morale is suffering even worse right now. The lower ranks see members of their chain of command avoiding blame for illegal, unmilitary behavior that they ordered or at least condoned, while the rank and file go to prison. Junior officers and noncoms either imitate their officers or ruin their careers. Innocents and victims are run through kangaroo courts and/or imprisoned forever. This is exactly the sort of situation that erodes military discipline and destroys morale.

The laws of war and a chain of command are all that makes an army different from a homicidal mob. The difference is, at best, very slight, but very, very important. Bosnia is what happens when a modern army is allowed to operate without close legal restraints and clear command responsibility. Once military norms break down, all social restraints collapse. We are already seeing early signs of this in our own forces, even off the battlefield: murders of soldiers by soldiers, suicides, rapes, drug abuse and drug dealing, extortion, embezzlement, theft of government property. A line has to be drawn.

That if it did, it was authorized.

That even though it didn’t happen but was authorized, he did know about it.

That while it didn’t happen but was authorized, and he knew about it, he was uncomfortable with it and tried to reduce its occurrence although it never happened.

As for this JSOC nonsense, it was supposed to be an advantage of the Special Ops model and McChrystal’s leadership in particular that he worked closely with those who in fact were doing the operations. Now he is being portrayed as just phoning it in in a more distant manner than even in the traditional chain of command. I mean which is it? So many stories. Which one are we supposed to believe today?

Citizen Ackerman and the Firepup Freedom Fighters:

Obama and Levin are clearin’ the way for the military brass to use the “we were only following orders” excuse of the German High Command and it CAN work for the US military but only if there are investigations and prosecutions of ALL those in the political high command. The way this is slowly unwinding, there will be no escape for those in the Bush administration from the OLC attornies right on up thru and including Bush and in payment for keepin their sorry asses out of Leavenworth, the military will be in Obama’s pocket.

KEEP THE FAITH AND PASS THE AMMUNITION, THIS WAR IS OURS, WE PAID FOR IT AND NOW WE MUST END IT!!