NYT Editorial: Mr. Rumsfeld's Defense

Mr. Rumsfeld, the military brass and some of the lawmakers badly missed the point by talking endlessly about a few bad apples in one military unit. The despicable acts shown in those famous photos — and in videos that are being held back by the military but may still produce another round of global humiliation — were uniquely outrageous and inexcusable criminal acts. But behind them lies a detention system that treats all prisoners as terrorists regardless of their supposed offenses, and makes brutal interrogations all too common.

The hearings also gave Americans a chilling new reminder of the mess the Bush administration, particularly Mr. Rumsfeld, has made of the Iraq occupation. With their perfect sense of certainty that they were right and everyone else wrong, Mr. Rumsfeld and his colleagues never planned adequately for the occupation. They were unprepared to handle the 43,000-plus Iraqi prisoners they ultimately took or the armed insurgents they faced — even though disorder and resistance were widely predicted.
...
Mr. Rumsfeld told the senators that his remarks about ignoring the international rules on the treatment of prisoners applied only to people captured in Afghanistan, not Iraq. That was a fine distinction some of the minimally prepared guards at Abu Ghraib may not have grasped, particularly since they were never instructed on the rules of the Geneva Convention. Like most Americans, however, they had heard their commander in chief paint the war in Iraq as an antiterrorism campaign.

Mr. Rumsfeld's belated apology yesterday was nice to hear. But the secretary spent a lot of time dodging responsibility. When he was chided for not telling the public, Congress or even the president about Abu Ghraib, Mr. Rumsfeld claimed that the Army had provided all the disclosure necessary last January with its inadequate press release announcing the criminal investigations. But when he was pressed on why he had not kept track of the case, Mr. Rumsfeld offered the astonishing argument that he could not have been expected to find this one case among the pile of 3,000 courts-martial initiated in the last year.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/08/opinion/08SAT1.html

From the same article:

Mr. Rumsfeld and other Pentagon witnesses said those untrained part-time soldiers had been put under the supervision of military intelligence officers who farmed out interrogation work to private contractors. That inexplicable chain of shifted responsibility violated not just any sort of common sense, but also military rules.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/08/opinion/08SAT1.html

This line jumped out at me. It almost wants to say "untrained part-time soldiers" equals too stupid to ask questions. That if the military employed the "right" kind of personnel there wouldn't or shouldn't be a problem because these people would follow orders and if (when) the shit hit the fan would be a convenient scapegoat. Those who committed these acts are certainly responsible, but responsibility starts from the top down.