'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

Schlesinger skewers mainly Sanchez

I have just started reading the Schlesinger report on US detainee operations. Its main thrust, in my reading is to skewer Lt.-Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, until recently the commander of all the forces in Iraq.

Douglas Jehl, in this piece in Wednesday's NYT, makes the judgment that the report "drew a line that extended to the defense secretary's office." I think that mis-characterizes the report a bit. In the part I've read, there are only a few references to any responsibility Rumsfeld or any other Pentagon suits might have had. But there are plenty to Sanchez and quite a few to Gen Myers, the head of Centcom.

The report seems to be a fairly serious piece of work, in the circumstances. (And yes, I write that in the full knowledge that their lenses and worldview are significantly different than mine.) The Commission members laid out a case that responsibility for the abuses should go high up both the military and Penatgon-civilian chains of command. In the Recommendations, however, they pulled their punches, notably not issuing there any explicit call for resignations or further prosecutions.

Elsewhere in the report, though, they do say the existing programs of prosecution should be pursued aggressively and perhaps augmented.

Here are some key passages from the Exec Summary:

Abuses of varying severity occurred at differing locations under differing circumstances and context. They were widespread and, though inflicted on only a small percentage of those detained, they were serious both in number and in effect... [T]he abuses were not just the failure of some individuals to follow known standards, and they are more than the failure of a few leaders [read: Karpinski?] to enforce proper discipline. There is both institutional and personal responsibility at higher levels.(p.7 of the PDF file there)

The Summary also noted that the panel had not had full access to info involving the CIA's role in detention ops and said, "this is an area the Panel believes needs further investigation and review."

The Summary--along with three of the Appendices--gives a fairly clear account of the giddying number of changes that interrogation policies underwent in the period between 2 December 2002, when Rumsfeld approved a new "tiered" policy that departed from the Army's decade-old FM 34-52 standards, and 13 May 2004, when Gen. Sanchez issued his own (third) set of revisions for the policy.

The Summary stated:

The policy memos promulgated [by Sanchez] allowed for interpretation in several areas and did not adequately set forth the limits of interrogation techniques. The existence of confusing and inconsistent interrogation technique policies contributed to the belief that additional interrogation techniques were condoned.(p.12)

In a final section on "Policy and Command responsibilities", it said:

Interrogation policies with respect to Iraq, where the majority of the abuses occurred, were inadequate or deficient in some respects at three levels: Department of defense, CENTCOM/CTJF-7, and Abu Ghraib prison...

At the operational level, in the absence of specific guidance from CENTCOM, interrogators in Iraq relied on FM 34-52 and on unauthorized techniques that had migrated from Afghanistan...

[W]e concur with the Jones/Fay investigation's conclusion that military intelligence personnel share responsibility for the abuses at Abu Ghraib with the military police soldiers cited in the Taguba investigation. [That's interesting: the Fay investigation is due to report tomorrow, Wednesday.] ... The Panl endorses the disciplinary actions taken as a result of the Taguba investigation. The Panel anticipates that the Chain of Command will take additional disciplinary action as a result of the referrals of the Jones/Fay investigation.

We believe LTG Sanchez should have taken stronger action in November when he realized the extent of the leadership problems at Abu Ghraib... We concur with the Jones findings that LTG Sanchez and MG Wojdakowski [who worked for Sanchez] failed to ensure proper staff oversight of detention and interrogation operations.

We note, however, in terms of its responsibilities, CJTF-7 was never fully resourced... It is the judgment of this panel that in the future, considering the sensitivity of this kind of mission, the OSD [that is, Rumsfeld's office itself] should assure itself that serious limitations in detention/interrogation missions do not occur.

By the way, several of the appendices are worth reading, for anyone who wants a quick window into the mindset of the US military. In addition to the informational appendices on the changes in interrogation techniques, etc., there is an interesting one on "psychological stresses" (starts p.114 in the PDF file).

No, that one is not about the psychological stresses that can occur to someone who has suffered torture/abuse--it's all about the psychological factors that can lead ill-trained, ill-supervised soldiers acting in stressful situations to start engaging in highly abusive behavior.

Another interesting appendix is titled "Ethical foundations of detention and interrogation" (starts p.122). This one is full of tortured (oops, bad term, that) and slightly earnest reasoning that tries to rationalize/justify a certain degree of ill-treatment during detentions/interrogations.

They pull out the infamous "ticking time bomb" argument, etc etc. But here is another argument I haven't seen in punishment theory for a while: the idea that by virtue of their behavior, "terrorists and insurgents 'consent' to the possibility of being captured, detained, interrogated, or possibly killed." Many things one could argue with there. But I'm also intrigued by the way they just conflate the two categories of "terrorists" and "insurgents" into one.

I would say that is a huge mistake, at many levels. Naming someone a "terrorist" supposedly gives the "good side" permission to use specially nasty means to confront him. But if you start treating "insurgents" like that, too, you'll just end up inflating the insurgency beyond where it was before. Which is--oops!--exactly what has been happening in Iraq.

At the end of that appendix, they make the observation that the existing ethics-education programs in the military have been highly inadequate: "They do not address humane treatment of the enemy and noncombatants, leaving military leaders and educators an incomplete tool box with which to deal with 'real-world' ethical problems."

I should note, before I sign off, that though the panel has done a good job pulling a lot of facts etc together in the report, and has sent the finger of command responsibility pointing higher than any official body has pointed to until nowstill, it does not address the core of the problem, which is the continued practice and auhtorization by the US military of abusive interrogation techniques that contravene the Geneva Conventions. Plus, the continued insistence by the Bush folks that the Geneva Conventions are somehow "out-dated" and therefore need not be applied in full in the so-called "War on Terror"-- or, apparently, in the war on the "insurgents" in Iraq.

It is those policies that need to be changed. No amount of "ethics education" n the military can make up for such profoundly anti-ethical policies.