So who's running this ship?

(Courtesy MoveOn)

President Bush approved a policy that the Geneva Convention wouldn't
apply to suspected al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters held in Guantanamo
Bay, Cuba. When the war in Iraq started to go badly, Rumsfeld extended
these aggressive interrogation policies to Iraqi prisons. According
to the current issue of Newsweek,

� "It was an approach that they adopted to sidestep the historical
� safeguards of the Geneva Conventions, which protect the rights of
� detainees and prisoners of war.� In doing so, they overrode the
� objections of Secretary of State Colin Powell and America's top
� military lawyers - and they left underlings to sweat the details of
� what actually happened to prisoners in these lawless places.� While
� no one deliberately authorized outright torture, these techniques
� entailed a systematic softening up of prisoners through isolation,
� privations, insults, threats and humiliation - methods that the Red
� Cross concluded were �tantamount to torture.�"

High-level officials in the Pentagon were sent from Guantanamo Bay to
Iraq to implement the more aggressive policies, and it appears that
command of the prison was placed in the hands of military intelligence
officers.� Techniques that had been approved only for suspected al-Qaeda
terrorists were suddenly applied to Iraqi prisoners (up to 90% of whom
were mistakenly detained, according to the Red Cross).

Despite the eagerness of the Bush administration to blame the torture
at Abu Ghraib on a few rogue soldiers, it is now clear that real
responsibility lies at the top of the chain of command.�

As the Commander-in-Chief, it's President Bush�s job to decide who runs
the Pentagon.� If he won't take the steps that are needed to restore
American credibility around the world, Congress needs to use its power
to convince the president to do the right thing - whether it issues a
clear public call for the Secretary's resignation or whether it uses
other leverage to force the Administration�s hand.