Abu Ghraib: Administration culpability?

[Blake]

Two alternate theories of the Iraq prisoner abuse scandal have been floated in this thread. One theory is that the current Administration ordered the abuses (though not explicitly and in detail), while another says that they are the regrettable deviations of a few enlistees.

My view is the former, that the administration did cause the abuses to happen, probably with the aim of gathering information about the insurgency in Iraq, but was cagey enough not to specifically order any of them. My evidence is Seymour Hersh's investigative reporting, in which he cites senior CIA sources, and the buttressing circumstancial evidence of the legal torture memos. (See also Bush's Churchillian Dreams.)

The trail to the administration passes through Stephen Cambone to Rumsfeld, for whom of course Bush retains responsibility. As yet, there appears to be a lot of responsibility on the CIA and Military Intelligence side which remains intensely murky, not to mention the outsourcing of interrogations to civilian contractors not covered by U.S. military codes and procedures.

What of Brigadier General Karpinski, direct supervisor of the prisons? My guess is that she was assigned more facilities than any one person could adequately supervise, and was possibly also selected as a reservist because she was likely to be out of her depth and thus not in control of the situation. That, however, is pure speculation on my part.

There is no definitive evidence in the form of specific orders and communications between the Pentagon and the other government agencies and subcontractors involved to document what took place. Indeed, at the rate the Administration is classifying and reclassifying material, none of it may ever become available. However, the legal memos to me provide damning evidence that the Administration was seeking to establish conditions that would cause such abuses to take place.

As usual, the full proof is slightly more complex. In this case, the issue I have barely seen discussed at all is that Abu Ghraib-style abuses are common practice at home; so in a sense, part of the problem may be as simple as the U.S. recreating prison conditions abroad that prevail here. In fact, Chip Frederick (one of the seven indicted servicemen) was a corrections officer in a facility investigated for prisoner abuse.

Primary sources: Legal memos reproduced at the Washington Post (pdf) and FindLaw, courtesy of the New York Review of Books.