Thursday, August 26, 2004
That's the title of this Opinion Journal piece on the Abu Ghraib investigation results.
A little perspective:
..."The behavior of our troops is so much better than it was in World War II," Mr. Schlesinger told us yesterday, by way of comparison. Of the Abu Ghraib photos, he added, "It is preposterous that what these pictures show is we were prepared to use torture to get information," as Senator Ted Kennedy and others have alleged. Rather, Mr. Schlesinger characterized the photographed Abu Ghraib abuses as "free-lance activities on the part of the night shift," echoing the testimony we've heard so far during the courts martial for the accused.
...Looking at mistreatment both at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere, the report says that "No approved procedures called for or allowed the kinds of abuse that in fact occurred. There is no evidence of a policy of abuse promulgated by senior officials or military authorities."
Another important international body becoming dangerously politicized, the ICRC:
In particular, the ICRC is rapped for insisting that the U.S. adhere to a controversial document known as Protocol 1, which the U.S. long ago explicitly rejected and which would grant terrorists and other non-uniformed combatants all the privileges of normal prisoners of war. The ICRC, the report says, promulgates this standard dishonestly "under the guise of customary international law."
The report suggests that the ICRC can still play a valuable role as "an early warning indicator of possible abuse," but that "the ICRC, no less than the Defense Department, needs to adapt itself to the new realities of conflict, which are far different from the Western European environment from which the ICRC's interpretation of the Geneva Conventions was drawn." We wonder if the journalists who've lived off Red Cross leaks will report this rebuke.
Conclusion:
But Mr. Schlesinger and his fellow panelists, having already had long and distinguished careers, have no motivation to risk their own reputations for Mr. Rumsfeld's. They have produced what's to date the definitive assessment of what went wrong, and the bottom line could hardly be more clear: While the Abu Ghraib abuses deserve to be punished, like other wartime excesses, the allegations that they had anything to do with so-called "torture memos" and a Pentagon "culture of permissiveness" are nothing but a political smear.