Congressional leaders on both sides of the aisle have called for Rumsfeld’s resignation, the revelations of the torture of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib being the final straw and probably only the tip of the iceberg. So far we have photographs from one time period at one prison; does anyone really think this was the only incident of abuse, despite the dysadministration’s predictable lies that it was an ‘isolated episode’? Evidence has already unfolded — of at least two murders of Iraqis in American custody, of the hundreds of photos circulating among returning British soldiers of prisoner torture under their guard, of the torture of prisoners at Guantanamo. My guess is that we have reached a ‘tipping point’, and reports will emerge tantamount to establishing a pervasive pattern of torture and murder throughout Iraq and throughout the fifteen months of the occupation.

An editorial in today’s Washington Post runs down “Mr. Rumsfeld’s responsibility — the horrific abuses by American interrogators and guards at the Abu Ghraib prison and at other facilities maintained by the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan can be traced, in part, to policy decisions and public statements of Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld. Beginning more than two years ago, Mr. Rumsfeld decided to overturn decades of previous practice by the U.S. military in its handling of detainees in foreign countries.” I have added my own items to the high points cited by the Post:

• the doctrine that we would not be bound by the Geneva Convention or be a party to the International War Crimes Tribunal, in a misguided and arrogant effort to place US military personnel above consequences for allegations of abuse
  
• arbitrary designations of whether captives are prisoners of war or unlawful combatants
  
• suspension of previous Army regulations on the interrogation of prisoners
  
• the outrageous practice of holding detainees incommunicado without access to assistance of counsel or any
  
  other mechanism for review of their captivity
  
• Rumsfeld’s Pentagon’s resistance to months of calls from the Coalition Provisional Authority and the State Dept. to address problems with the treatment of prisoners, as well as reports that they concealed captives from international monitoring agencies such as the ICRC (whose complaints to the US government probably prompted the Taguba investigation
  
• Rumsfeld’s continued assertion, to this day, that the acts at Abu Ghraib did not amount to torture:
  

  “My impression is that what has been charged thus far is abuse, which
  
  I believe technically is different from torture,” Secretary of
  
  Defense Donald Rumsfeld said on Tuesday. “I don’t know if it is
  
  correct to say what you just said, that torture has taken place, or
  
  that there’s been a conviction for torture. And therefore I’m not
  
  going to address the torture word.” — Salon

• the franchising of aspects of the war effort to private contractors whose level of accountability to the chain of command or anyone is virtually nil New York Times —
  
• the handing over of the prisons to military intelligence and the pressure to enlist their prison guards in their desperate effort to ‘break’ Iraqi prisoners so that they might fabricate incriminating evidence in the face of the US lies that justified the US incursion
  
• the disdain for providing adequate troop levels. adequate compensation, honoring commitments on lengths of tours of duty, or providing honorable and sound care for the battlefield casualties either in Iraq or upon their return to the US.

While credible reports from administration sources suggest that the President dressed Rumsfeld down for his handling of the abuses, Bush publicly stood by him today and insisted Rummy would remain in the Cabinet. Despite the fact that even Karl Rove said it would take a decade to overcome the effects of this scandal on Arab attitudes toward the US (and I think that is optimistic), the dysadministration’s approach to damage control amounts to disciplining a handful of enlisted officers and ‘admonishing’ a handful of commanding officers, in so doing steering the response away from holding anyone criminally culpable for what are clearly war crimes. By insisting that their actions are not representative of the US military as a whole, arranging hackneyed interviews with Arab news outlets, posing with the King of Jordan, and by leaking the news that he had reprimanded Rumsfeld but refusing to sanction him in any meaningful way, it is clear that Bush and his handlers are trying to do the dance of satisfying public opinion while escaping any meaningful consequences for this monstrous examplar of American disdain for the rights of others. We should not let him get away with it. Call your senators and congressional representative to urge them to push the demand that Rumsfeld step down or be fired.

But the Abu Ghraib incident is only the occasion that pushes the envelope. If Rumsfeld is sacked, it will be impossible in the eyes of the world to dissociate his responsibility for the prisoner abuse from his overall failures — on both management and moral levels — in the prosecution of the war and its aftermath. And that confusion will be justified! The imperious, racist, monomaniacal attitude of the Vulcans that has created a climate permissive or encouraging of torture of prisoners is the same attitude that has led to the US lurching from crisis to crisis in an occupation-turned-morass, completely failing to understand why we are attacked rather than celebrated, and destroying the country because we are unable to turn it into a client state. The real question: would Rumsfeld falling on his sword be enough? Not by a longshot. Even his departure will not salvage the credibility of this dysadministration in the eyes of the rest of the world and, hopefully, the American electorate. The era of the US having a claim to any shred of moral authority behind its autocratic bullying is irrevocably past and regime change draws near; hopefully people will understand that Rumsfeld’s being a sacrificial lamb is too little too late to make a difference.