When it comes to the Abu Ghraib torture scandal, the editorial page of The New York Times Carter writes in a review<\/FONT><\/B><\/A> of Seymour Hersh’s <\/P> The Straight Up reader who pointed out Carter’s review notes: “The last paragraph, in <\/P> A key question for American voters to decide on Nov. 2, therefore, is whether to hold the
\nhas been especially strong in condemning the White House and the Pentagon. My take was that
\n“nobody has said it better.”<\/FONT><\/B><\/A> Well,
\nmaybe somebody has: Intel Dump<\/FONT><\/B><\/A> blogger Phillip
\nCarter.<\/P>
\n
\nCommand: The Road from 9\/11 to Abu Ghraib”<\/FONT><\/B><\/A> for the November issue of
\nWashington Monthly (also posted<\/FONT><\/B><\/A> on Intel Dump):<\/P>
\n
\nThe devastating scandal of Abu Ghraib wasn’t a failure of implementation, as
\nRice and other administration defenders have admitted. It was a direct — and predictable —
\nconsequence of a policy, hatched at the highest levels of the administration, by senior White
\nHouse officials and lawyers, in the weeks and months after 9\/11. Yet the administration has
\nlargely managed to escape responsibility for those decisions; … almost no one in the press or the
\npolitical class is talking about what is, without question, the worst scandal to emerge from
\nPresident Bush’s nearly four years in office.<\/BLOCKQUOTE>
\n
\n
\nparticular the last two sentences, makes a very important point that seems to have been
\nunmentioned in nearly everything else I have seen.” To wit:<\/P>
\n
\n[T]here’s a reason why most of the investigations into Abu Ghraib have
\npunted on the essential question of executive responsibility. To judge the administration’s
\ndecisions to have been wrong, after all, requires us to discern what the right decisions would have
\nbeen. And to do that, we must put ourselves in their shoes. Given the particular conditions faced
\nby the president and his deputies after 9\/11 — a war against terrorists, in which the need to extract
\nintelligence via interrogations was intensely pressing, but the limits placed by international law on
\ninterrogation techniques were very constricting — did those leaders have better alternatives than
\nthe one they chose? The answer is that they did. And we will be living with the consequences of
\nthe choices they made for years to come.<\/BLOCKQUOTE>
\n
\n
\nIgnoramus in Chief and his cronies accountable and, by turning them out of office, elect a
\npresident who will choose the better alternatives from here on in. If the W. gang is returned to
\noffice, voters will have condoned willful bad judgment, moral myopia and deliberate deception —
\nand they will have only themselves to blame when the nation’s reputation, already dragged
\nthrough the mud, sinks still lower.
\n