The road to Abu Ghraib: the biggest scandal of the Bush administration began at the top

Washington Monthly, Nov, 2004 by Phillip Carter

The memos had another practical effect, which was the evisceration of any legal opposition from the ranks to the proposed methods of interrogations. Military units of a certain size are staffed with JAG officers, chaplains, and other professionals who typically serve as a unit's legal and ethical conscience. In formal and informal ways, they vet operational plans to ensure missions comply with the laws of war. According to Army doctrine, operational orders at the brigade level and above must contain an annex covering the legal implications of the plan, procedures for dealing with prisoners, and other issues. It's not clear to what extent the actions at Abu Ghraib were subjected in this sort of scrutiny before they were implemented. But even if a young JAG officer were to raise objections in the field, it's unlikely they would have gone anywhere. The memoranda from the White House--signed by the commander-in-chief's top lawyer--stamped the interrogation tactics with the imprimatur of legality, ensuring that any dissent from the field would have been ignored.

Finally, the memos directly affected the junior soldiers, like Pfc. England, who now stand accused of torturing Iraqi prisoners. Every new soldier learns in basic training that he or she must follow lawful orders when they are given. But they also learn they must disobey orders--to kill innocent civilians, for example, or torture detainees--that are unlawful, and they cannot invoke "superior orders" as a defense when those orders are illegal. The junior soldiers now charged with abuses at Abu Ghraib should have objected to any orders to abuse prisoners, because they were patently immoral and unlawful. But in reality, that's easier said than done. After all, the orders to interrogate prisoners by coercion had come from the very highest levels of the administration. They had been filtered through every level of the chain of command without objection. Senior administration lawyers with Ivy League credentials and decades of experience had approved these procedures, including some that were startlingly close to those depicted in the Abu Ghraib photographs, such as the use of stress positions and hoods. It may be unrealistic to expect that a junior enlisted soldier such as England, or even her immediate supervisor, Staff Sgt. Ivan Frederick, would have the knowledge or the temerity to contradict such orders when they were given. The effect of the Bush administration's exhaustively creative research into breaking the rules was virtually to ensure that every player in this tragedy went along and followed orders.

Unintended consequences

Two other decisions by the Bush administration also proved fateful, both of them made long before the Iraq war began. One was the administration's attempt--directed by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld--to run the Iraq war with fewer soldiers in place than considered military opinion believed necessary. The resulting shortage of troops set the conditions for abuse at the prison. The after-action report by the Army's JAG school specifically blames troop shortages for the chaotic and disorganized detainee operations in Iraq, sharply criticizing the decision to delay the deployment of the 800th Military Police Brigade--the unit responsible for Abu Ghraib--until well after combat had begun. From the moment it touched ground, the 800th was behind the eight ball, and it's not clear the brigade ever got a handle on the detainee mission.