- When a crime is committed, the investigating agency always
vows to find those who are responsible and bring them to justice. The clear
implication is, of course, that the responsible person(s) are guilty of
the crime and will merit the required punishment.
-
- So it was with some amusement that I watched the squirming
Donald Rumsfeld take "full responsibility" during the Senate
hearings into the crimes committed at Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad. The
mostly softball questions thrown at him by that partisan band did not exploit
this insincere admission because neither he nor his inquisitors have considered
what such responsibility entails.
-
- "Mr. Secretary, by admitting responsibility for
these heinous acts, are you prepared to undergo trial by a military tribunal
and suffer the prescribed punishment? After all, murder, rape, sodomy and
other forms of torture are serious offences to be responsible for, are
they not?" That's what I would have asked but alas, such questions
never surfaced.
-
- One pertinent query that was put to Rumsfeld was, "Did
you approve the regulations under which these interrogations were being
conducted?" The man with the steel-trap mind (and selective memory)
couldn't recall whether or not he had seen or approved such a directive.
This line of questioning was not pursued further even though the general
belief is that such policies could not have been implemented without authorization
from the director himself.
-
- The White House let it leak that President Bush had reamed
Rumsfeld out, something that GW had never done before. So, the intimation
clearly was that the seemingly unchastened Rumsfeld had been duly "punished"
and that should be the end of it.
-
- Following the committee hearings, chief administration
partisan Dick Cheney loudly ordered everyone to "get off his [Rumsfeld's]
case and let him do his job!" And all this time I thought that was
the whole point -- he wasn't doing his job!
-
- The severest penalty mentioned for Rumsfeld outside the
Star Chamber, aka the White House, is resignation -- something Rummy has
vowed not to do -- or outright dismissal. Having the Bush ventriloquist
Cheney in his corner seemed to all but guarantee that particular punishment
would not be meted out. In fact, Bush quickly absorbed the script and three
days later visited the Pentagon to read his lines, to wit, that Rumsfeld
was doing a "superb job." Wow, what a tough taskmaster!
-
- One cannot set aside the fact that the International
Red Cross had witnessed and reported the systematic abuse of Iraqi prisoners
to several higher-ups in the administration as early as July of last year.
These people included Cheney, Powell, Rice and Wolfowitz et al, none of
whom saw fit to act on the complaint or to alert Bush of its importance.
Therefore, any pretense at surprise by this group is an out and out falsehood.
-
- And yet Rumsfeld had the temerity to make the following
statement, gleaned from the DOD's own web site, in a BBC interview on March
16 of this year: "There's [sic] still remnants of that regime [Iraq]
that would like to take it backÖ They could torture people and have
rape rooms, and the world would turn their head from that and let it happen.
But they can't do that anymore."
-
- Nope they can't do that anymore because we now own the
concession, lock, stock and barrel.
-
- The irony of it all is that this administration, whose
chief executive takes his direction directly from God, (who, by the way,
somehow failed to inform him of the crimes at Abu Ghraib), has always laid
claim to the high moral ground. His rabid supporters from the "Moral
Majority" rant about moral imperatives, rail against sexual sinning
and how seedy and immoral the Clinton administration was. By God, they
were going to show everybody how a God-fearing people could make the world
right in preparation for the ultimate showdown with Satan.
-
- Given all their pouting, pirouetting, revulsion and rhetoric
about homosexual behavior, I am surprised that spokespersons Robertson
and Falwell did not quickly raise their voices on the sexual depravity
perpetrated by our troops in Iraq. Alas, just when we needed them, the
Moral Majority went AWOL.
-
- George Bush and responsibility have been total strangers
for a long time as evidenced by his ignoring and refusing to apologize
for the many lies he has told the American public. He knew that a U.S.
Army investigation into prisoner abuse in Iraq had been underway for three
months, but this did not deter him from remarking at a White House meeting
on March 12, 2004, that, "Every woman in Iraq is better off because
the rape rooms and torture chambers of Saddam Hussein are forever closed."
-
- Right, George, spin that fairytale to the women who have
been beaten and raped. Tell it to the lady in her 70s who had her papers
and jewelry confiscated, was held for six weeks for no legitimate reason,
had a harness placed on her and was ridden like a donkey. Was this a promotion
of women's human rights, Bush administration style?
-
- Americans had no problem making Saddam Hussein responsible
for the crimes committed by his minions in pre-war Iraq. It was always
Saddam's torture chambers, Saddam's rape rooms, Saddam's prisons, Saddam's
murders, etc. It was never the acts of a group of untrained, misguided
or demented people. No, the blame rolled all the way uphill to the top,
as it should have. However, that's not the way it works here in America.
You won't hear anyone say it was Bush's rape rooms or Bush's torture chambers
or even Bush's prison. It was clearly the acts of a few poorly trained
low-level people in the military who took it upon themselves to "soften
up" prisoners for further interrogation. Yeah, right, no responsibility
here!
-
- And for those who say, "But the Iraqis, Muslims,
Arabs -- (pick one) -- have done worse" in order to justify our behavior,
I say it's not a case of who commits the greatest atrocity or a question
of taking an eye for an eye because that behavior debases you, your comrades
and the rest of civilized society. It also sets one hell of an example
of "democracy" in action.
-
- Remember, the dust hadn't settled on 9-11 before we were
blaming whole countries, if not an entire geographic region, for the acts
of a few. We were not having it that this was the undertaking of a small
group of deranged fanatics. So, now as the chickens are en route home,
clucking all the way, will the responsibility and the punishment roll up
the hill as it did for Saddam or will a half-dozen GIs take the fall? Don't
hold your breath waiting for the answer on that one.
-
- Americans are now being taught that it is relatively
painless to take responsibility (or to shun responsibility) for illegal
and heinous acts if you're sufficiently high up in the country's officialdom.
The buck stops there, but punishment never makes it across the threshold.
-
- - Raff Ellis lives in the United States and is a retired
former strategic planner and computer industry executive. He has had an
abiding and active interest in the Middle East since early adulthood and
has traveled to the region many times over the last 30 years.
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- http://yellowtimes.org/article.php?sid=1929&mode=thread&order=0<
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