Always on Friday: Abu Ghraib Officers Cleared

When Rachel Maddow signed off for the last time from her Air America show a few weeks ago, she left listeners with a few pieces of advice. One of these which really stuck in my mind was to always be sure to monitor the news on Friday evenings. The really interesting material seems to always come out then, (at least in terms of things the administration doesn't want you looking at too closely) because fewer people watch the news on Friday night or read the papers on Saturday morning.

Yesterday was no exception. Last night, both CNN and the Guardian released the news that the Army has cleared all of the top level officers involved in the Abu Ghraib torture scandals had been mysteriously cleared of all charges and responsibility.

The Army has cleared four top officers -- including the three-star general who commanded U.S. forces in Iraq -- of allegations of wrongdoing in connection with prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib, officials said Friday.

Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, who became the senior commander in Iraq in June 2003, two months after the fall of Baghdad, had been faulted in earlier investigations for leadership lapses that may have contributed to prisoner abuse.

He is the highest-ranking officer to face official allegations of leadership failures in Iraq, but he has not been accused of criminal violations.

After assessing the allegations against Sanchez and taking sworn statements from 37 people involved in Iraq, the Army's inspector general, Lt. Gen. Stanley E. Green, concluded the allegations were unsubstantiated, said the officials who were familiar with the details of Green's probe.

Green reached the same conclusion in the cases of two generals and a colonel who worked for Sanchez.

Isn't it amazing that, even after the revelation of the Gonzales torture memos and numerous position papers from the Bush administration about how these prisoners didn't fall under the Geneva Conventions, there was nobody responsible except for a few low ranking soldiers in the field. They were just the "bad apples" that we hear so much about, I suppose.

Michael Froomkin lays it on the line.

So the official line remains: just a few (dozen, hundred) widely dispersed low-ranking bad apples in several locations who were encouraged by email from Washington to do the same things. None of whom ranked above sergeant, except maybe one female scapegoat reservist general, who says her orders came from … Sanchez.

TalkLeft offers an interesting comparison between this report and one released over the winter. The predictions had been made long ago, and now they've come true. Nobody involved in this fiasco at a high level will ever be held accountable. If they were, they would likely start pointing fingers further upward. So some of those "Our Troops" which the right wings loves to embrace are sent off to the slammer as scapegoats.