Joseph L. Galloway
is the senior military correspondent for Knight
Ridder Newspapers and a nationally syndicated
columnist. One of America's preeminent war
correspondents, with more than four decades
as a reporter and writer, he recently concluded
an assignment as a special consultant to Gen.
Colin Powell at the State Department.
Galloway, a native of Refugio, Texas, spent
22 years as a foreign and war correspondent
and bureau chief for United Press International,
and nearly 20 years as a senior editor and
senior writer for U.S. News & World Report
magazine. His overseas postings include tours
in Japan, Vietnam, Indonesia, India, Singapore
and three years as UPI bureau chief in Moscow
in the former Soviet Union. During the course
of 15 years of foreign postings Galloway served
four tours as a war correspondent in Vietnam
and also covered the 1971 India-Pakistan War
and half a dozen other combat operations.
In 1990-1991 Galloway covered Desert Shield/Desert
Storm, riding with the 24th Infantry Division
(Mech) in the assault into Iraq. General H.
Norman Schwarzkopf has called Galloway "The
finest combat correspondent of our generation
-- a soldier's reporter and a soldier's friend."
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WASHINGTON - Another official report on the treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo, Afghanistan and Iraq has come and gone. It was the ninth probe into the scandals that first erupted at Iraq's notorious Abu Ghraib prison, and so far all the Pentagon has managed to do is get to the bottom, the very bottom, of the problem.
Those at the top, both civilians and military, have once again been given a pass when it comes to assessing who was responsible for the command climate and the written rules that permitted prisoners to be treated like animals or worse, in violation of the Geneva Conventions.
Last week, Vice Adm. Albert Church III, a former Navy inspector general, testified on Capitol Hill and released a 21-page summary of his classified report. Like the authors of all the other investigations, he concluded that only a handful of lower-ranking soldiers should be punished for the abuses.
Other senior officers, active and retired, don't buy that.
"To suggest that senior officials were blameless in fostering the command climate that led to the behavior of those junior guards at the prison is simply not credible," retired Army general officer, John Johns, told Knight Ridder.
"One needs only to read the trail of documents from the Justice Department to the White House to the Office of the Secretary of Defense to Guantanamo to the commander in Iraq to see a clear direction to waive international norms of behavior," added Johns, a 26-year Army veteran who holds a doctorate from American University, taught ethics at West Point and has lectured on the subject at the Naval Academy and the Army and Air Force war colleges.
Adm. Church's report, however, said the latest investigation found "no single, over-arching explanation" for the prisoner abuses, and that authorized interrogation policies weren't at fault. The report said the investigation found "no evidence to support the notion that the office of the Secretary of Defense, the National Security staff, CentCom (the military's Central Command) or any other organization applied explicit pressure for intelligence or gave back-channel permission to forces in the field to use more aggressive interrogation techniques."
That misses the point, said retired Army Lt. Gen. Sam Wilson, perhaps the military's foremost expert on intelligence, counter-insurgency and special forces.
"The whole Abu Ghraib matter was sickening to me, not so much for what it cost us (unnecessarily), but for what it represented in the breakdown of command supervision, discipline and good order," Wilson said. "And while some take refuge in the absence of carefully worded and thoroughly promulgated policies from on high regarding interrogation practices, commanders worth their salt at the field and company grade levels know where the boundary lines are in this arcane business ... and so do experienced non-coms. Somebody was simply asleep at the switch and his (their) posteriors should be burned severely."
Despite the administration's efforts to avoid responsibility for everything but success, some principled people in uniform knew early on that the guidance on the treatment of prisoners that flowed down from the Pentagon's top civilians was wrong and violated international norms, and they tried to say so.
Military lawyers from the Judge Advocate General's Corps, or JAG officers, told news organizations that when they urged greater rights and protections for prisoners, they ran afoul of Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith and Pentagon general counsel William Haynes II. Eight JAG officers held an off-the-record meeting in 2003 with Scott Horton, the chairman of the New York Bar Association's committee on international human rights law.
Horton later confirmed the meeting and said the military lawyers were deeply troubled by the movement away from the Geneva Conventions' protection for prisoners of war, which they felt was being orchestrated by civilian leaders in the Pentagon.
Former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell also argued against ignoring the Geneva Conventions, but his objections, too, were swept aside.
One day we may learn the truth about Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo and discover how high in the Bush administration the buck climbs before it stops. One day, perhaps, but don't count on it anytime soon.
In the meantime, said retired Army Gen. Johns, the "hypocrisy of the Pentagon will not only erode our moral standing, it will erode the moral fiber of our nation in general and our military in particular," he added.
