Unqualified Offerings

While I’ve been working long hours, there has been news.

“Bad apples.” The horrible thing, it hit me today, is that the institutionalization of torture throughout our military detention system has proceeded along the vector of our military’s greatest virtue, which is the fostering of individual initiative at all levels of the service. America has always trained its soldiers to be flexible and creative in solving problems within the guidelines laid down by higher echelons. In the case of torture, there is a clear paper trail and considerable evidence of verbal directive to the effect that “the gloves are coming off” and previously standard prohibitions don’t apply. The general message is clear. Then comes glorious, characteristically American tragedy:

The sleeping bag was the idea of a soldier who remembered how his older brother used to force him into one, and how scared and vulnerable it made him feel.

When the American Armed Forces are acting in accordance with the laws of war and the country’s highest principles, that kind of initiative is its proudest feature. It’s why the American Army that rolled into Germany had more trucks than it started out with. It’s Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain’s improvised pivot on Little Round Top. When badly led by squalid men, in and out of uniform, that creativity turns evil, even cruel. This is how “bad apple” talk and denials that Higher ordered any particular enormity distort.

And even badly led, our military contains men who remember what oath they took and for which country they took it, who recall the primacy of the republic for which the flag stands over the fabric sample itself. Men like Sgt. 1st Class Michael Pratt of, it should be noted, Red State Utah:

“I didn’t contact my chain of command because the only chain of command I had was Chief Welshofer,” Pratt said. “I had reported this kind of action to the 3rd ACR chain of command before, and the response was that every time I reported something, the chain of command would investigate me . . .

“I believe that the chain of command was complicit with the unlawful activities, that is why I didn’t report it to them.”

On Christmas Day 2003, Pratt traveled from Iraq to Kuwait, where he met up with the Utah National Guard’s officer in charge of interrogations. That officer, whose name does not appear in the transcript, would be the first senior official to take Pratt’s allegations seriously.

Via Amygdala.

Meanwhile, the Poor Man says what I’ve been thinking:

I don’t want to labor the point, but I find it kind of hard to understand how, with this going on, Hilary Clinton finds the time to get outraged by the secret boobies code in Grand Theft Auto. It must be nice to have a mind so untroubled, right there in the seat of power, is all I’m saying. It must be nice.

Nevertheless Marty Lederman writes

It’s increasingly obvious that we will not have a full and fair accounting of this dark chapter in our history—and that we will not have an accurate picture of what was authorized, nor what continues to be authorized, for the CIA and the Pentagon—until we have divided government.

and that’s certainly a necessary but not sufficient precondition. Is there a single verb that means “to become vertebrate?” Because that’s the other requirement.