Whitewash at Abu Ghraib

While the public’s attention was diverted by the release of the 9/11 Commission’s long-awaited final report on Thursday, the Army sneaked the results of its internal investigation of the Abu Ghraib prison-abuse scandal out the door. The report can be summed up succinctly: everything that happened at Abu Ghraib can be blamed solely on a few bad apples.

Or, as the report said, the abuses were “unauthorized actions taken by a few individuals, coupled with the failure of a few leaders to provide adequate monitoring, supervision, and leadership over those Soldiers.” And just to be perfectly clear, the investigation “could not identify a systemic cause for the abuse incidents.”

It seems they did not look very hard.

There was no mention of the Pentagon policy to expand the use of “physical distress,” nor of the White House policy to get around American and international anti-torture laws. The congressional testimony from numerous military figures, that the top brass knew what was happening but at best tacitly approved it, was similarly ignored.

When the scandal originally broke three months ago, I wrote that the only way to recover from the body blow was to “punish those responsible for these outrages, not just the individuals who committed them but their superiors who allowed them to happen. The accountability should lead as far up the chain of command as needed; nobody should be immune due to their rank or position.”

This has not happened. Quite the opposite: the word from the Army has come down, and that word is whitewash. Let the little guys take the blame, and the fact that they were told “anything goes” is irrelevant. Sweep it under the rug. The top brass must be protected no matter what.

The Bush Administration came to office on a platform of integrity and responsibility. One would think that such a boneheaded policy, guaranteed to go wrong at some point and provoke a massive international scandal to further demolish our shredded national credibility, would have consequences. Someone should be held accountable; someone should have to take responsibility.

Apparently not. At least, not for the people who made the policy. It has been decided that only the bottom-level soldiers who carried out the policy while grinning into the camera, clearly unconcerned that they would be answerable for their actions, are to blame in this case.

Now, this should not be read as meaning the soldiers who actually committed the abuses should go free: they should absolutely be punished for what they did, and the “I was just following orders” defense is no excuse. But the people who gave them those orders should be punished as well, and the Army’s report clearly says that this will not happen.

The Army has demonstrated that they cannot and will not police themselves. It’s time for a truly independent investigation.