squidpants

so call me a conspiracy theorist, but I'm not really buying this Abu Ghraib trail stuff, it seems to me like the guards on trial now are taking all the blame, when some should rest with the Army officers (mostly reservists, I think) in charge of the prison and/or the intelligence people who were stationed there. Charles Graner, the guy on trial now, is supposedly the ringleader of a lot of it, but his rank is a Specialist. That's a pretty low enlisted rank, and Lynndie England (the grinning woman in the photos) was a Private First Class, which is even lower. I mean I'm no military expert, but my dad was in the Air Force for 30 years and the impression I get is that people of those ranks don't do anything unless either officers tell them to or they are delegated to do it by higher enlisted people, who got their orders from officers. These guards, like Graner and England, obviously did some of the torturing, but it seems to me that the officers either told them to do it, were grossly negligent by not knowing this was going on, or intelligence people were telling the guards what do to and hiding it from the prison commanders. And the things they did were pretty much the most humiliating things you could do to Muslims, which makes me think that some serious thought went into it - i.e. by intelligence officers. Of course, people being able to run wild can probably think of awful torture methods pretty quickly, but I think there should be some sort of outside investigation into the intelligence officers and the prison commanders. It just doesn't make sense that some low-ranking enlisted people can do all of this awful stuff without anybody else knowing.