Posted on: Monday, August 30, 2004

EDITORIAL
Reports don't ease Abu Ghraib scandal

With the passage of time and seven defendants in the dock, it might be tempting to hope that the Abu Ghraib scandal has run its course.

Nothing could be further from the case.

The latest investigative reports to be made public, if nothing else, confirm that torture was part of the daily drill in the Baghdad prison, and that participation in and knowledge of it went well beyond the hapless loweriranking troops who now are expected to shoulder the blame.

Our example of open, self-correcting democratic governance is a key precondition for eventually winning hearts and minds in the Middle East and elsewhere.

In deciding to forgo many of our democratic traditions in the treatment of a wide range of prisoners, high-ranking officials in the Bush administration set us up to fail.

And now, in seeking to confine the political fallout to a few badly trained troops, the administration compounds the felony. "At the time some of the soldiers or contractors committed the acts (of torture)," one report says, "they may have honestly believed the techniques were condoned."

One report mentions as causes of this scandal President Bush's decision to make Iraq part of the war against terror, the search by Justice Department lawyers for ways to circumvent the Geneva Conventions, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's bungled planning of the occupation and understaffing of the ground forces in Iraq.

But the report fails to connect the dots, and thus fails to establish responsibility or recommend accountability.

The classified portion of one report says that Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the former top commander in Iraq, improperly approved harsh interrogation techniques. "Sanchez signed a memorandum authorizing a dozen interrogation techniques beyond" the standard Army practice under the Geneva Conventions, including "five beyond those approved for Guantanamo."

He did so, the report says, "using reasoning from the president's memorandum of Feb. 7, 2002," which he believed justified "additional, tougher measures." The president's memo outlined his decision that Geneva Conventions would not apply to captured members of al-Qaida and Afghanistan's Taliban.

The new reports recommend blame for no one above the rank of colonel. Yet no effective review can avoid consideration of the contradictory and cold-blooded memos that emanated from Rumsfeld's office, the Justice Department and the White House. People in the field, investigators note, were confused as to how far to apply the administration's posture that the Geneva Conventions applied only where the president saw fit.

"These events occurred on my watch," Rumsfeld told the Senate Armed Services Committee last May. "As secretary of defense, I am accountable for them and I take full responsibility."

We agreed with him then, although we also believed that his words implied a consequence. We urged Rumsfeld's resignation then, as we do now.