The Important Stuff

Are there dots that journalists should be connecting here? Even the accusation by former administration insider Lawrence Wilkerson that there was a "visible audit trail" tracing the practice of prisoner abuse by U.S. soldiers directly back to Vice President Cheney's office didn't seem to get the traditional press riled up. (See my November 4 column .)

Essayist and blogger Andrew Sullivan weighed in with an important piece this weekend in the Sunday Times of London: "I do not believe that this president has ever acknowledged his own responsibility for the atrocities committed by Americans on his watch and under his command. He simply cannot process the fact that his own hand provided the signature that allowed torture to spread like a cancer through the military and CIA.

"He cannot acknowledge that his own war policy -- of just enough troops to lose -- has created a war of attrition in Iraq in which soldiers are often overwhelmed and demoralised and stretched to the limit, and so more than usually vulnerable to the psychic snaps that sometimes lead to atrocities.

"His obdurate refusal to change course, to provide sufficient troops, to fire his defence secretary, to embrace, rather than evade, the McCain amendment has robbed him of any excuse, any evasion of responsibility.

"And yet he still evades it. Last week he spoke of Abu Ghraib as something that had somehow happened to him and to his country, almost as if he were not the commander-in-chief or president of the country that had committed such abuse. When the evidence is presented to him, he displaces it. He puts it to one side. In his mind America is a force for good. And so it cannot commit evil. And if he says that often enough it will somehow become true. In this way his powers of denial kick in like a forcefield against reality."

Indeed, to the extent that the White House is responding to these atrocities at all, it is to order a refresher course on "core values" for all troops -- while at the same time, insisting that Geneva Convention protections be explicitly dropped from its new detainee policy.

Julian E. Barnes broke that story in Sunday's Los Angeles Times: "The Pentagon has decided to omit from new detainee policies a key tenet of the Geneva Convention that explicitly bans 'humiliating and degrading treatment,' according to knowledgeable military officials, a step that would mark a further, potentially permanent, shift away from strict adherence to international human rights standards.

"The decision could culminate a lengthy debate within the Defense Department but will not become final until the Pentagon makes new guidelines public, a step that has been delayed. However, the State Department fiercely opposes the military's decision to exclude Geneva Convention protections and has been pushing for the Pentagon and White House to reconsider, the Defense Department officials acknowledged."

Amid a deafening silence from the reporting side of other news organizations, the editorialists are speaking out.

The New York Times writes: "It defies belief that this administration is still clinging to its benighted policies on prisoners after the horrors of Abu Ghraib, the killings at American camps in Afghanistan and the world's fresh outrage over what appears to have been the massacre of Iraqi men, women and children in the village of Haditha."

The Boston Globe writes: "The Pentagon wants to have it both ways. It intends to provide new training in core values to its troops after reports of an alleged massacre of Iraqi civilians by Marines, but it also wants to ignore a Geneva Convention rule against 'humiliating and degrading treatment' of prisoners. This mixed message can only complicate the decision-making of US personnel at the same time it further tarnishes the international reputation of the United States."

Domestic Spying Watch

John Diamond writes in USA Today about Cheney's astonishing short-circuit of a promised congressional investigation into domestic spying.