Chain of command

Seymour Hersh's latest article in the New Yorker focuses on the failures in the chain of command that allowed Abu Ghraib to happen. There's a section on Rumsfeld's management of the Pentagon, and a description of another series of photos showing the use of army dogs on a naked and helpless prisoner. There's some stuff about command of the prison being turned over to military intelligence, and the way their use of unmarked uniforms (used to disorient prisoners and depersonalise the process) blurred the chain of command. And there's an example of what should have happened when interogators requested that prisoners be "softened up":

Not everybody went along. A company captain in a military-police unit in Baghdad told me last week that he was approached by a junior intelligence officer who requested that his M.P.s keep a group of detainees awake around the clock until they began talking. "I said, ‘No, we will not do that,’" the captain said. "The M.I. commander comes to me and says, ‘What is the problem? We’re stressed, and all we are asking you to do is to keep them awake.’ I ask, ‘How? You’ve received training on that, but my soldiers don’t know how to do it. And when you ask an eighteen-year-old kid to keep someone awake, and he doesn’t know how to do it, he’s going to get creative.’" The M.I. officer took the request to the captain’s commander, but, the captain said, "he backed me up.

"It’s all about people. The M.P.s at Abu Ghraib were failed by their commanders - both low-ranking and high," the captain said. "The system is broken - no doubt about it. But the Army is made up of people, and we’ve got to depend on them to do the right thing."