When it comes to the Abu Ghraib torture scandal, the editorial page of The New York Times
has been especially strong in condemning the White House and the Pentagon. My take was that
“nobody has said it better.” Well,
maybe somebody has: Intel Dump blogger Phillip
Carter.
Carter writes in a review of Seymour Hersh’s “Chain of
Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib” for the November issue of
Washington Monthly (also posted on Intel Dump):
The devastating scandal of Abu Ghraib wasn’t a failure of implementation, as
Rice and other administration defenders have admitted. It was a direct — and predictable —
consequence of a policy, hatched at the highest levels of the administration, by senior White
House officials and lawyers, in the weeks and months after 9/11. Yet the administration has
largely managed to escape responsibility for those decisions; … almost no one in the press or the
political class is talking about what is, without question, the worst scandal to emerge from
President Bush’s nearly four years in office.
The Straight Up reader who pointed out Carter’s review notes: “The last paragraph, in
particular the last two sentences, makes a very important point that seems to have been
unmentioned in nearly everything else I have seen.” To wit:
[T]here’s a reason why most of the investigations into Abu Ghraib have
punted on the essential question of executive responsibility. To judge the administration’s
decisions to have been wrong, after all, requires us to discern what the right decisions would have
been. And to do that, we must put ourselves in their shoes. Given the particular conditions faced
by the president and his deputies after 9/11 — a war against terrorists, in which the need to extract
intelligence via interrogations was intensely pressing, but the limits placed by international law on
interrogation techniques were very constricting — did those leaders have better alternatives than
the one they chose? The answer is that they did. And we will be living with the consequences of
the choices they made for years to come.
A key question for American voters to decide on Nov. 2, therefore, is whether to hold the
Ignoramus in Chief and his cronies accountable and, by turning them out of office, elect a
president who will choose the better alternatives from here on in. If the W. gang is returned to
office, voters will have condoned willful bad judgment, moral myopia and deliberate deception —
and they will have only themselves to blame when the nation’s reputation, already dragged
through the mud, sinks still lower.
Postscript: This could be the weirdest thing you ever read
about Abu Ghraib.
