Don’t they? Here’s a May 17, 2004,
editorial on the perpetrators of the Abu Ghraib atrocities:
They have endangered any American unlucky enough to find himself at the mercy of our enemies in the war on terror. They have impeded our progress in that war. More fundamentally, they traduced their mission, betrayed their fellow soldiers, and disgraced their country. Anyone up or down the chain of command who was criminally complicit should be prosecuted, too.<…>
There’s only one way to drain this poison, and it isn’t further breast-beating, from the administration or its foes. Bring on the trials, and the punishment.
Quite right! As the
report (pdf) of the Senate Armed Services Committee makes (even more) clear, the abuses at Abu Ghraib were the direct result of
policies implemented by the Bush administration:
<...>
Speaking to CBS this morning, Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, who ran Iraq prisons in 2003, including Abu Ghraib, “
was insistent that all orders on interrogation practices came from the top down during the Bush administration.”
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