They damn well knew...

By Libby

Sy Hersch has a profile piece in The New Yorker on General Taguba, the unfortunate soul who was tasked with investigating Abu Ghraib. It's a fascinating look at another high ranking officer who sacrificed his career by commiting the ultimate cardinal sin inside this administration -- putting the truth above political loyalty.

Just as in the internal 9/11 investigation, Taguba was barred from pursuing his inquiry beyond the lower ranked officers even though it was clear to anyone with more than two firing synapses that the orders, and the responsibility, went all the way to the top. It's a richly detailed article that doesn't lend itself to excerpting and I'd urge you to read it in full, but here's the closer.

Taguba went on, “There was no doubt in my mind that this stuff”—the explicit images—“was gravitating upward. It was standard operating procedure to assume that this had to go higher. The President had to be aware of this.” He said that Rumsfeld, his senior aides, and the high-ranking generals and admirals who stood with him as he misrepresented what he knew about Abu Ghraib had failed the nation.

“From the moment a soldier enlists, we inculcate loyalty, duty, honor, integrity, and selfless service,” Taguba said. “And yet when we get to the senior-officer level we forget those values. I know that my peers in the Army will be mad at me for speaking out, but the fact is that we violated the laws of land warfare in Abu Ghraib. We violated the tenets of the Geneva Convention. We violated our own principles and we violated the core of our military values. The stress of combat is not an excuse, and I believe, even today, that those civilian and military leaders responsible should be held accountable.”

The GOP controlled Congress failed utterly in pursuing this matter and justice has been delayed for a very long time, not just for the victims of the abuse but for the hapless soldiers who took the fall for Rummy and his cadre of thugs. One might hope that this new information would engender an inquiry that would finally hold those who were truly responsible, accountable for Abu Ghraib and furthermore shed some light on what appears to be an ongoing illegal black-ops program being conducted at the orders of the president himself.