Loyalty Is Everything

    

May 17 Issue - Donald Rumsfeld likes to be in total control. He wants to know all the details, including the precise interrogation techniques used on enemy prisoners. Since 9/11 he has insisted on personally signing off on the harsher methods used to squeeze suspected terrorists held at the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The conservative hard-liners at the Department of Justice have given the secretary of Defense a lot of lee-way. It does not violate the spirit of the Geneva Conventions, the lawyers have told Rumsfeld, to put prisoners in ever-more-painful "stress positions" or keep them standing for hours on end, to deprive them of sleep or strip them naked. According to one of Rumsfeld's aides, the secretary has drawn the line at interrogating prisoners for more than 24 hours at a time or depriving them of light.

If it were possible to be a true war god, to aim every arrow that flies, to smite every foe and avenge every wrong, maybe Donald Rumsfeld would be that man. But it is not, and in Greek tragedies the gods themselves are brought low by pride. In Washington, where the assassin's weapon is usually a well-placed leak, Rumsfeld last week was left explaining, with uncharacteristic pitifulness, that hehad not seen the actual pictures that appalled the world until eight days after the images first appeared on CBS's "60 Minutes II."

Apparently, even the almighty Rumsfeld could not control everything that happens in the vast American gulag that has sprung up since 9/11 to deal with enemies of the state. In Iraq, Rumsfeld's aides say, the Defense secretary delegated responsibility for interrogation methods to Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the ground commander of the occupying forces. The military believes in chains of command, but somehow the chain became twisted and broken as it worked its way down into the prisons where the United States has kept, for too long and in wretched conditions, up to 50,000 detainees. In Baghdad, at Abu Ghraib --a hellhole where Saddam Hussein once tortured his countrymen--someone seems to have delegated authority to the Devil.
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"If there's a failure, it's me," said Rumsfeld to the senators. "These events occurred on my watch. As secretary of Defense I am accountable for them, and I take full responsibility." Rumsfeld offered his "deepest apology" to the victims of abuse and announced that they would be compensated. Would he resign? "It's a fair question," he replied to interrogators during a long, grim day of hearings before both the Senate and House Armed Services committees. "Since this firestorm started, I have given a good deal of thought to the question... If I thought that I could not be effective, I certainly wouldn't want to serve. And I have to wrestle with that."

The former Princeton wrestler may be increasingly tied in knots. There is mounting evidence of abuse in American military and supersecret intelligence prisons around the world. There is also growing evidence that Rumsfeld, or his top deputies and aides, did not want to hear the rumblings from such suspect organizations as the Red Cross and the State Department.

President Bush stood by Rumsfeld last week, more or less. Washington eyebrows were raised when stories appeared in The New York Times and The Washington Post at midweek, sourced to anonymous White House aides, suggesting that Bush was displeased with Rumsfeld for bungling the prison-abuse story. In the secretive, loyalty-is-everything Bush White House, such public wrist slaps are exceedingly rare. But most polls showed that the public did not want Rumsfeld fired. And by the end of the week Bush was telling an aide to instruct "your clackers" (Bushspeak for press staff) that if he heard any chatter from White House aides about Rumsfeld's getting fired, "they'll have to answer to me."

» MSNBC - No Good Defense