Not the Commander in Chief, who authorized torture by Memorandum of Feb. 7, 2002, announcing and implementing a new policy that detainees be treated “humanely, as appropriate, and as consistent with military necessity.”
Not then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, nor his deputy Paul Wolfowitz, nor U.S. pro-consul Paul Bremer, nor troop commander Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, nor Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller (in charge of Gitmo-izing Abu Ghraib), nor Sanchez’s intelligence chief Maj. Gen. Barbara Fast, nor National Security Council functionary Frances Townsend.
All of the above visited Abu Ghraib during the torture year of 2003 before the photos surfaced the next year.
Had it never occurred to them that their incessant pressure on Army interrogators to find non-existent WMD in Iraq and nonexistent ties between Iraq and al-Qaeda, together with the expanded list of torture techniques duly approved by hired-gun lawyers in the Pentagon, the Office of the Vice President, and the Department of Justice, would lead to the abuses of Abu Ghraib?
Not to mention things like the marginal notes from Rumsfeld, on the list of torture techniques, “Make sure this happens.”
Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell
Only one general officer passes the smell test, and he with flying colors—Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba.
On Jan. 31, 2004, he was asked to look into the abuses at Abu Ghraib. A mark of his seriousness of purpose is the fact that Taguba completed his investigation in two months and did not sugarcoat his findings: “Systemic and illegal abuse of detainees ... numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses.”
In an attempt to explain how it could be that Taguba could deviate so far from the official line, one wag speculated that, for some reason, Taguba “didn’t get the memo.”
He did an honest job—and we would probably not ever have seen his unvarnished findings, had not some patriotic truth-teller (aka leaker) made it available. That was the end of Taguba’s Army career, however. Several months after his report leaked, Taguba got a phone call from his boss telling him to retire.
Looking back, Taguba recently told Seymour Hersh, “I assumed they wanted to know. I was ignorant of the setting.” [See The New Yorker, June 25, 2007.]
The general spoke of his futile attempts to get senior generals to focus on the problem of torture. One lieutenant general was at least candid in rebuffing Taguba: “I don’t want to get involved...because what do you do with that information, once you know?...”
Taguba also spoke of the indignities thrown his way by Rumsfeld and martinets like Gen. John Abizaid who, like so many other high officials—civilian, as well as military—seem to have forgotten the oath we all took to defend the Constitution of the United States.
A few weeks after his report became public, Abizaid turned to Taguba with a pointed warning: “You and your report will be investigated.”
Preferring to hold onto his belief in an Army led by generals with integrity, Taguba later expressed his disappointment that Abizaid would have that attitude.
Awakening to the new reality, though, Taguba let it all out in a very telling way: “I had been in the Army 32 years by then, and it was the first time that I thought I was in the Mafia.”
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