Double Standard

One of the very few officer corps casualties of the Abu Ghraib war crimes scandal was Major General Antonio Taguba. He had worked his way up the ranks from a military family in the Philippines. His father was a Philippine Scout who survived the Bataan Death March. Late in his distinguished career,Taguba got stuck with the career ending assignment of investigating what happened in the wee hours at the infamous prison. As Taguba himself put it to his interlocutor Seymour Hersh,"If I lie, I lose. And if I tell the truth, I lose." Luckily for America, he chose to honor his code and tell the truth. The truth is that the military police unit caught on camera subjecting prisoners to perverted follies were not simply a "few rotten apples". They were directed by military intelligence personnel to breakdown detainees for interrogation. The intelligence interrogators were using torture approved by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. The White House knew about the interrogations early on and well before Taguba's report in May 2004 despite his superiors' disingenuous claims of ignorance. Taguba, as the bearer of unwanted news, was asked to retire in 2007 after thirty-four years of honorable service. He never got his third star, but that is of relatively little consequence compared to the humiliation and suffering inflicted on innocent civilians by our soldiers following orders. Below is a particularly cogent point made by General Taguba:

From the moment a soldier enlists, we inculcate loyalty, duty, honor, integrity and selfless service, and yet when we get to the senior officer level we forget those values. I know that my peers in the Army will be mad at me for speaking out, but the fact is that we violated the laws of land warfare in Abu Ghraib. We violated the tenets of the Geneva Convention and we violated the core of our military values....[T]hose civilian and military leaders responsible should be held accountable.

Impeachment now.