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@Elephantman
All you're missing is a couple of colonels, a handful of majors, some captains, lieutenants, etc., who all must have been in on the caperThe chain of command in a military hierarchy does indicate that such would be the case. But you try to make it sound like some sort of implausible cockamamie conspiracy, when what transpired was more like standard operating procedure within a hierarchical bureaucracy.
It's patently misleading to insist or imply that specific orders must have been given, in regard to each abusive practice that was committed by Graner and his unit. It's sufficient for the superior officers in the hierarchy of supervision- from (above) Maj. Gen. Miller on down, to send the message to those with hands-on authority over the detainees that ordinary norms of humane conduct toward those in their custody don't apply, meanwhile keeping pointedly silent on what won't be allowed- or whether any limits whatsoever exist in that regard.
And, as I mentioned previously, it's the apparent case that the warden of the prison was kept "out of the loop" regarding the "realm of high-security interrogations" quite purposively, with overt measures taken to keep her from having complete knowledge and control over the prison for which she held supposedly full responsibility.
It's noteworthy that the Abu Ghraib scandal only came to light as the result of the ubiquitous new technology of cell-phone cameras, and the transmission of the photos via email on the Internet- a new, compact technology which allowed a glaring "security loophole" that was obviously unforeseen. With anything less than the photographic record that amounted to a "smoking gun", full containment of the torture scandal would almost certainly have been assured. Not even allegations and admissions by former participants would have been enough to merit more than a cursory mention in the news media, in and of themselves.
But- the photographs! They did their end run around the Great Wall of Official Bureaucratic Deniability...so they sacrificed a few goats, in the hope that it would appease the citizenry.
And that's where matters stand, at present...except for that lump and those scaly tails, protruding from under the rug.
-- cabdriver
No, you don't get to re-frame the question now. Mark Benjamin wrote that Graner was "ordered." That has a military connotation. You don't get to change it now. My question to Mark Benjamin remains -- Who ordered Graner? What were the orders?
The longer this goes, the worse the embarassment for Mark Benjamin, it seems to me. Because this isn't nit-picking one odd sentence out of a 5000-word essay. It is Benjamin's basic thesis: that Graner must be understood, however difficult that may be, in terms of his having been ordered to do these acts.
Indeed, the faithful Salon readership, confronted with the odd disjoint between Graner's supposedly having been "ordered" to do these acts, and his apparent juvenile (if not sadistic) pleasure in the acts themselves (sex with his female comrades, cellphone pics sent back home, laughing and joking as later reported) has led to much criticism of Benjamin's article along the lines of, "Yes, Rumsfeld should be in prison, but so should Graner, orders or not." The Salonistas clearly want to believe the "orders" part of the story, and perhaps that is why a like-minded writer like Mark Benjamin may have been so careless with the original assertion.
But I think it is a pure falsehood, and my challenge to Mark Benjamin to show us how it is that his major premise is anything other than a pure lie goes, still, unanswered.
