THE ROAD FROM ABU GHRAIB TO ELECTION DAY

When it comes to the Abu Ghraib torture scandal, the editorial page of The New York Times has been especially strong in condemning the White House and the Pentagon. My take was that "nobody has said it better." Well, maybe somebody has: Intel Dump blogger Phillip Carter.

Carter writes in a review of Seymour Hersh's "Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib" for the November issue of Washington Monthly (also posted on Intel Dump):

The devastating scandal of Abu Ghraib wasn't a failure of implementation, as Rice and other administration defenders have admitted. It was a direct -- and predictable -- consequence of a policy, hatched at the highest levels of the administration, by senior White House officials and lawyers, in the weeks and months after 9/11. Yet the administration has largely managed to escape responsibility for those decisions; ... almost no one in the press or the political class is talking about what is, without question, the worst scandal to emerge from President Bush's nearly four years in office.

The Straight Up reader who pointed out Carter's review notes: "The last paragraph, in particular the last two sentences, makes a very important point that seems to have been unmentioned in nearly everything else I have seen." To wit:

[T]here's a reason why most of the investigations into Abu Ghraib have punted on the essential question of executive responsibility. To judge the administration's decisions to have been wrong, after all, requires us to discern what the right decisions would have been. And to do that, we must put ourselves in their shoes. Given the particular conditions faced by the president and his deputies after 9/11 -- a war against terrorists, in which the need to extract intelligence via interrogations was intensely pressing, but the limits placed by international law on interrogation techniques were very constricting -- did those leaders have better alternatives than the one they chose? The answer is that they did. And we will be living with the consequences of the choices they made for years to come.

A key question for American voters to decide on Nov. 2, therefore, is whether to hold the Ignoramus in Chief and his cronies accountable and, by turning them out of office, elect a president who will choose the better alternatives from here on in. If the W. gang is returned to office, voters will have condoned willful bad judgment, moral myopia and deliberate deception -- and they will have only themselves to blame when the nation's reputation, already dragged through the mud, sinks still lower.

Postscript: This could be the weirdest thing you ever read about Abu Ghraib.