Supporting Our Troops
This guy is taking a bullet for his chain of command. Nobody wrote a memo for him saying he could do whatever the fuck he wanted with prisoners. They took his picture , therefore he is guilty. If his chain of command were not dysfunctional, he would have been disciplined long before the those pictures became public. If they didn't know they are unfit for command. If they did, they are tacitly responsible.
Seems only a year or two ago I heard the sleazy right wing snake oil salesmen, who have recently infected NPR, gloating over how the gloves were off. In bubbly voices, they enumerated the methods now at their disposal. Sleep deprivation. Threatening situations. Uncomfortable positions for interminable periods. Were apparently okay as long as no external devices were required to produce discomfort. As these guys gleefully recited their newly found tools, I could hear the sound of knuckles cracking in their voices. I was horrified.
Basically, there are three reasons why an intelligent force does not use torture. A combat soldier used to memorize the first in basic training. An enemy fearing torture will not surrender. He will fight to the death and take out as many of his enemy as he can. A battle that ends with an enemy surrender is as valid as one that ends with his death.
Secondly, an enemy who know torture will be used upon him will also “apply” it for whatever purposes if you are captured by him.
Finally, torture is not effective. A tortured person will say or do anything to stop the torture. The erroneous information will cause resource-intensive wild goose chases if you are dumb enough to believe what he said.
The guys who dismissed this kind of logic as “liberal bullshit” are suddenly as hard to find as weapons of mass destruction. Maybe they never existed. Maybe it too was all an hallucination, those knuckle cracking, presumably unpaid spokesmen (I never heard a woman do it) for the delights of the Marquis de Sade. No regrets on my part, good riddance even, but you’d think they’d at least have the honor to stand up for their ideological victims such as Private England and SPC Graner.
There was some controversy as his trial began, some parsing of his “following orders” defense. Some, also presumed unpaid, commentators (they sure looked a lot like the knuckle crackers to me, maybe with new suits and haircuts) called this the “Nuremberg Defense.” They said that didn’t work for the Nazi death camp privates and specialists because a war crime is a war crime and it is the duty of a conscientious soldier to disobey those orders. I don’t know why Eduardo Gonzales was so eager to protect his client from the possibility of these charges rolling uphill, months before the acts of torture happened, when it is the duty of the individual soldier to disobey such directives, but I do know this: The commanders of the “Nuremberg Defense” troops all (with the notable exception of Albert Speer) ended up with nooses around their slippery necks by the time all was said and done.
10:57:55 PM 
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