Shirking Responsibility-Leadership, Top Brass and Torture

[LiviaOlivia]

Sunday, September 25, 2005
Shirking Responsibility
Scott Horton

"Command is a sacred trust. The legal and moral responsibilities of commanders exceed those of any other leader of similar position or authority. Nowhere else does a boss have to answer for how subordinates live and what they do after work."

-- Dep't of the Army, Field Manual 22-100, sec. 1-61.

With a sense of timing that can only be described as exquisite, the Secretary of the Army, Francis J. Harvey, and the Army Chief of Staff, General Peter J. Schoomaker, have published a defense of the Army's handling of the torture and prisoner abuse scandal in the National Review Online, just as another, particularly gruesome, chapter in this seemingly endless saga breaks across the front pages of the nation's newspapers..... We are rapidly arriving at the point where the denials of military senior brass and political appointees who supervise them can only be viewed either as shirking responsibility or as confirmation that torture and abuse are official U.S. policy. It is hard to judge which of these alternatives is more harmful to the nation and its armed forces.

Torture at Camp Mercury

The new stories paint a now very familiar tale. They focus on an airborne unit stationed at Camp Mercury, a forward base near Fallujah, in some of Iraq's most hotly contested real estate, and they date from 2003 and 2004 -- which is to say, the events were ongoing as the Army conducted its internal investigation focusing on Abu Ghraib and other detention centers in Iraq. However, other new reports emerge from Camp Tiger, located on the Iraqi-Syrian frontier, and from Afghanistan.

According to the allegations -- detailed in a new Human Rights Watch Report -- Military Intelligence (MI) officers directed soldiers in daily beatings of prisoners before they underwent interrogation. Some beatings were severe, involving brutal disfigurement. In one case a detainee's leg was broken by blows from a metal bat. Other techniques used included subjecting detainees to strenuous exercises until they collapsed into unconsciousness; and exposure to extremes of heat and cold. As at Abu Ghraib, prisoners were stacked in human pyramids and had their faces exposed to burning chemicals. Food and water were withheld and prisoners were regularly forced into stress positions. CIA interrogators were involved along side of MI personnel, and by some accounts the CIA was the source of some of the torture techniques.
~snip~

read the rest at:
http://balkin.blogspot.com/2005/09/shirking-responsibility.html