More troubling than the abuses themselves...

U.S. missed chances to stop abuses

Yet more evidence that the Bush administration is both incompetent and irresponsible. Sure, the abuses themselves are abhorrent, but to either ignore or dismiss the signals that there was a problem is unconscionable.

Whether the abuses were limited to the acts of a few bad apples is irrelevant. The fact of the matter is that these abuses represent a failure of leadership, both military and political. The guards were unprepared and untrained. The chain of command was ill-defined, confused, and changed over time between military and non-military. The administration and the top brass at the Pentagon would have us believe that the responsibility for these acts lays solely with the individuals who perpetrated the abuses. This is such utter bullshit.

While there may be no evidence of specific orders to the prison guards to sexually humiliate the prisoners as a part of the interrogation "enablement", the true responsibility lies much further up the chain of command for failure to exert clear leadership. If humane treatment of the prisoners, in accordance with the 3rd Geneva Conventions of War, was an important concern of the political and military leadership, you can bet the farm that these concerns would have been clearly and unambiguously communicated down through the chain of command, and that the first hint of these abuses would have been met with swift and just punishment to make it clear to all that such abuses would not be tolerated. Instead, it took the unauthorized release the photographic evidence through the press before the issue received the attention of the political and military chain of command that it rightly deserved.

This failure of leadership runs straight to the Oval Office.