Torture accountability ignored

Boston public radio station WBUR's OnPoint carried Tuesday an absolutely must-listen-to program


``Hear a discussion on who should be held accountable when prisoners in American custody are tortured and killed''

Deep Blade Journal has for all of the last eleven months since the Abu Ghraib atrocity photos emerged, demanded accountability for torture up the chain of command all the way to the President of the United States. Instead, underlings of the president who helped him conceive the legal environment under which the atrocities were at minimum tacitly approved and permitted to occur have been promoted -- in the most important instance to the highest law enforcement office in the land.

Do listen to the OnPoint program suggested above for a deeply concerned, deeply probing discussion of the issues involved. The guests included John Hutson (see below); Mark Danner, author of ``Torture or Truth: America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror,'' professor of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley; Gary Solis, Professor of Law at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point; and Craig Murray, the former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan.

John Hutson, President and Dean of Franklin Pierce Law School, former Judge Advocate General for the U.S. Navy is party to a lawsuit against Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld filed by the American Civil Liberties Union and Human Rights First about a month ago. Hutson explains on the OnPoint program why this lawsuit is a last resort for justice in an environment where the executive is culpable to the core and Congress is wholly complicit and useless.

JOHN HUTSON: [The lawsuit] is seeking a declaration by the court that there is accountability in these cases -- that it's not just a few bad apples, as Secretary Rumsfeld so cavalierly and dissmissively characterized ... what happened. And we feel very strongly that the chain of command is the spine that makes for good order and discipline in the military, and it's first cousin -- accountability -- is really the life blood of the military. And accountability means that you can delegate the authority to take certain actions, but you cannot delegate the responsibility for those actions. We have in these cases, in my judgment, completely ignored any concepts of accountability, and we've said rather, well, it's a few bad apples, we'll prosecute them, we'll pat ourselves on the back, congratulate ourselves for the great job we've done And I think that that's a big mistake.

Please also see this at Eschaton and Bob Herbert's Tuesday column.