Reynolds Keeps Flailing

I should count it as a victory of sorts that Instapundit was finally forced to read the report that proves that the techniques used at Abu Ghraib - those in the photos that Reynolds once called "torture" deserving "jail or execution" - were indeed SERE techniques authorized by president Bush as commander in chief. He then argues that these techniques can only be directly linked to Bush at Gitmo, not Abu Ghraib, or in the countless other theaters of war where war crimes took place against prisoners in US custody. The trouble at Abu Ghraib, Reynolds claims, accusing me of dishonesty, was a matter of "climate".

Let's unpack this a little. It is a mercy, I suppose, that Reynolds finally cops to the fact that the president authorized the techniques at Abu Ghraib - beatings, hoodings, mock executions, stress positions, nudity and use of dogs to terrify, among others. Even he cannot deny the memos or their contents that we have discovered since then, when he is forced not to simply ignore them. He also cannot dispute that he has endorsed Jack Goldsmith's view that the president who authorized these conscience-shocking acts was engaged in an understandable "mistake", for which he has already suffered enough, and not war crimes, subject to impeachment or prosecution.

So Reynolds' position has changed, from viewing these acts as torture deserving jail or execution to viewing them as political mistakes that should be forgiven and let be. The change is attributable to only one thing, so far as I can tell: he believes it's torture worth jail or execution when a reservist does it; it's a political mistake when a civilian official or friend authorizes it. If you want to see how deep the corruption among the Bushies is, look no further than a law professor making arguments as transparently unjust as these. Punish the grunts; excuse the commanders; protect the civilians who made the real decisions.

It remains an inconvenient truth, however, that, under military command, the superior officer is always responsible for the acts of those beneath his command.

When that commander-in-chief has personally authorized such techniques himself, he assumes total legal and moral responsibility for those war crimes. So even if Reynolds' own skewed view of the report is accepted, his conclusion still doesn't follow. Bush is responsible, morally and legally and operationally, for war crimes under his command - war crimes for which Bush refuses to take any responsibility.

But, of course, his view is skewed, as partisan propaganda often is. As the Taguba and Fay and Jones reports found, the importation of the Gitmo techniques to Iraq was directly ordered from the very top. General Geoffrey Miller was directly sent by Rumsfeld to Abu Ghraib to "Gitmoize" it, i.e. to transport the Communist torture techniques honed at Gitmo to a theater of war that even Rumsfeld believed was subject to Geneva. Miller was ordered to take the gloves off and round up thousands of innocents for mass abuse and torture because the Iraq insurgency had taken Bush and Cheney by surprise and they responded in the only way they knew or trusted: by violence, force and torture (which we now know were the pillars of their war strategy from the first). Does Reynolds believe that the mass round-ups of Iraqis into Abu Ghraib jail were not authorized by the commander-in-chief? Does he believe that the order to get intelligence on the insurgency was invented by a few bad apples on the night shift? Does he really think that the exact same SERE techniques authorized by Bush were replicated in exquisite detail by barely literate grunts like Graner and England by some sort of telepathy or "climate"?

Well: this is what you have to believe if you are to keep defending this administration.