Another whitewash, this time on torture

Credit where credit is due: the Bush gang may display breathtaking incompetence at times, but they’re really good at whitewashing their problems away. It may be their single most effective skill.

Last month, it was the Bush-appointed commission charged with identifying the massive intelligence failures over Saddam Hussein’s weapons capabilities. We learned that the commission is prepared to point the finger of blame directly at … no one in particular.

This month, it’s our torture policies and the fact that no one is getting blamed for the fiasco.

Senators expressed dismay yesterday that no senior military or civilian Pentagon officials have been held accountable for the policy and command failures that led to detainee abuse in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the Navy admiral who wrote the most recent review of U.S. detention policies was largely unable to say where that accountability should lie.

Vice Admiral Albert T. Church III’s review of interrogation policy and detention operations did not place specific blame for the confusing interrogation policies that migrated from Washington to the battlefield, and he told the Senate Armed Services Committee at a hearing that no high-level policy decisions directly led to the abuse. But Church said he did not interview top officials, including Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, nor did he make conclusions about individual responsibility, saying it was not part of his mission.

Par for the course. Americans engaged in widespread torture, at multiple facilities in a variety of theaters, and when it comes time to look into it, we’re back to a “few bad apples.” A few low-level soldiers face court-martials, but there’s certainly no need for accountability among their leaders, right?

In fact, there’s ample evidence that the new Church report is something of a joke.

It conveniently ignores President Bush’s declaration that terrorists are not covered by the Geneva Conventions and that Iraq is part of the war against terror. Mr. Bush later said the conventions would cover Iraqi military prisoners, but the Church report said military commanders in Iraq had never been given guidance on handling prisoners, a vast majority of whom were not soldiers. Still, the report tossed this off as merely a “missed opportunity.” It overlooked Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s approval of interrogation techniques for Guantánamo that violated the Geneva Conventions. It glossed over the way military lawyers who were drafting later rules were ordered to ignore their own legal opinions and instead follow Justice Department memos on how to make torture seem legal.

The Church report said that “none of the pictured abuses at Abu Ghraib bear any resemblance to approved policies at any level, in any theater.” Admiral Church and his investigators must have missed the pictures of prisoners in hoods, forced into stress positions and threatened by dogs. All of those techniques were approved at one time or another by military officials, including Mr. Rumsfeld. Of course, no known Pentagon policy orders the sexual humiliation of prisoners. But that has happened so pervasively that it clearly was not just the perverted antics of one night shift in one cellblock at Abu Ghraib.

The Church report said assessing the personal responsibility of Mr. Rumsfeld and other top officials had been the job of another panel headed by a former defense secretary, James Schlesinger. Well, not exactly. That group, appointed by Mr. Rumsfeld, found “both institutional and personal responsibility at higher levels” for Abu Ghraib. But the panel declined to name names.

And so the wait for accountability continues. Independent commission? No. Congressional investigation? Of course not. Public outrage? Hardly. It’s a disgrace.