BIG FISH SHOULD FRY FOR ATROCITIES

..............................The Patriot-News
.........................Friday, February 4, 2005
................................Harrisburg, Pa.

.........................DAVID HACKWORTH

That sizzling sound you're hearing from U.S. Army
posts across the nation is little fish frying. It reminds
me of the battlefield, where it's almost always the
grunts who get hung out to do the dying.
A squad of the enlisted perps who made their bones
via the Abu Ghraib abomination are going down, and so
they should. They've disgraced the American profession
of arms by committing atrocities as high on the national
shame scale as Vietnam's My Lai. But while the accused -
untrained, part-time soldiers ill-prepared for their prison-
guard mission - most definitely deserve to be punished,
where are the whales who disregarded the Geneva
Convention in line with our president's ill-considered
insistence that prisoners in the war on terror are "unlawful
combatants"?
Unlike Nuremberg, which led with the trials of the top
leadership of the Third Reich and only gradually worked
its way down to the bottom of that evil ladder, our leaders
are, so far, successfully ducking any responsibility for the
crimes perpetrated on their watch.
In the duck-and-cover-up scheme, Alberto R. Gonzales,
the president's legal adviser and his nominee for attorney
general - who told the president in writing that the war on
terror made the Geneva Convention obsolete - is now
ferociously tap-dancing away from his advice to his boss
as fast as he can toward his probable new and totally
inappropriate job as America's top law-enforcer.

Assistant Attorney General Jay S. Bybee, who said it was
cool for the president to permit "cruel, inhuman or degrading"
treatment of prisoners in the war on terror if he so desired,
has been rewarded with a seat on the 9th U.S. Circuit Court
of Appeals.
SecDef Donald Rumsfeld, whose approval of torture at
Guantanamo set a sorry precedent that spread as quickly as
the plague to Afghanistan and Iraq, has also been duly
rewarded - with a second term in his sugarplum Cabinet
power post.
Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, Rummy's torture impresario at
Gitmo, whom the SecDef dispatched to Abu Ghraib - where,
soon after he marched into the prison to teach his dirty
tricks, prisoners were humiliated and demeaned in horrific,
SS-like human-rights violations - is now ensconced in a VIP
office at the Pentagon.
Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the former ground commander
of the Iraqi counterinsurgency, who put out his own appalling
guidance regarding the treatment of prisoners, has pretty
much disappeared from the scene, along with his intelligence
officer, Maj. Gen. Barbara Fast. The Army has hidden the
once-certain shoo-in for a fourth star in Germany, while Fast
has become the two-star ghost that walks at Fort Huachuca,
Ariz., where she makes occasional, quickie cameo appearances
and the troopers in residence refer to her as the "invisible
general."
Let's face it - the reservists now on trial didn't just wake up
one morning and say, "Hey, let's mail-order some dog leashes
and play some photo-op games with these ragheads keeping
us away from home." I know U.S. soldiers, and my call is that
an officer or officers - going all the way back to the Pentagon -
told them how to break their prisoners down and to go and do it.
So, in my book they're taking the rap for the brass as well as
themselves, and that's not how it should be in our America.
Hopefully, Sens. John McCain and Chuck Hagel, who well
understand terrorism, torture and national honor, will do their
duty and lead the way to the big fish who called the shots and
then did a Houdini when the notorious Abu Ghraib pix made the
top of the news and shocked the entire world. Brig. Gen. Janis
Karpinski might be a smart place to start - the word is that she's
both an eyewitness and a straight shooter who will do her duty
as well.
Because in a democracy, the truth must come out, and all the
guilty - no matter what their rank or power - must be held
accountable. Our country's very honor is at stake.
That said, in no way should the dishonorable behavior of the
Abu Ghraib prison guards stand as representative of the average
American soldier in Iraq - whose overall conduct in a terrible war
has been most honorable and nothing less than magnificent.

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Col. David H. Hackworth (USA Ret.) is SFTT.org co-founder
and Senior Military Columnist for DefenseWatch magazine.
For information on his many books, go to his home page at
<http://www.hackworth.com where you can sign in for his
free weekly Defending America. Send mail to P.O. Box 11179,
Greenwich, CT 06831.
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I have been an admirer of Colonel Hackworth for over thirty years.