Yankeedoodle gives his own very detailed and clear analysis of the Taguba report in his Today in Iraq blog today. Check it out. It’s toward the bottom of that post.
YD’s a genius.
His conclusion:
- Coupled with the Hersch piece, MG Taguba’s AR 15-6 report and a few other news items I’ve posted recently, it seems to me that there was indeed a blanket policy of coercive interrogation applied to the Iraqi detainees in US custody at Abu Ghraib. The media is missing the story here. The scandal isn’t the lower-ranking MP soldiers we’ve seen in the infamous pictures or their piss-poor leadership– and I’m not defending either of them.
The issue is a blanket policy of coercive interrogation. Somebody made the decision to apply that policy through Military Intelligence channels. Presumably, the decision-maker made a conscious cost-benefit analysis, weighing the potential intelligence value of detainees against the damage that would result if word of the abuse that results from such a policy were made public, especially in light of the administration’s War on Terror.
- It also appears that the administration, as well as the media, is going to try to pin the blame for this shameful decision on a few low-ranking soldiers and ignore the larger issues of incompetence–not to mention illegality–of policies originating at the highest level in the Defense Department.
The media and Congress should pursue the recommendations MG Taguba made in his report, specifically the Procedure 15 against members of the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade, and see where those policies originated in the chain of command.
There is also a report in the Army Times that MG Taguba has been unexpectedly reassigned from his duties at CFLCC to the Pentagon. Big surprise.
Actually, I think the administration’s effort to keep the focus on the front-line implementers of the abuses will fail— not least because those currently accused and/or standing trial will have, I imagine, competent military lawyers who will have a strong interest in pursuing the antecedents and context to their actions right up the chain of command (in the OSD) as far as it will go.
(Look also at the feistiness displayed by the military lawyers assigned as defendants in the first Gitmo cases… The JAG people are to be applauded in this, far as I can see.)