Following Orders?, page 1

. The army is trying Lt. Col. Steven Jordan for his role in the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. Jordan is a reservist who ran the interrogations at Abu Ghraib. He is being charged with 8 of the original 12 offences among them, cruelty and maltreatment

apnews1.iwon.com
HAGERSTOWN, Md. (AP) - The only U.S. military officer charged with a crime in the Abu Ghraib scandal will be court-martialed on eight charges, including cruelty and maltreatment of prisoners, the Army said Friday.
Lt. Col. Steven Lee Jordan, a 50-year-old reservist from Virginia who ran the interrogation center at the Iraqi prison, was accused of failing to exert his authority as the place descended into chaos, with prisoners stripped naked, photographed in
Jordan was charged in April with 12 offenses. Swann dismissed four of them after Jordan was given an Article 32 hearing, the military equivalent of a civilian preliminary hearing, in October.

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The only U.S. military officer charged with crimes relating to the Abu Ghraib isn’t that odd? The military is arranged so that each person in the chain of command takes orders from those directly above them. Thus are we to believe that Lt. Col. Jordan was acting on his own when ‘torture’ was incorporated into the treatment regime at Abu Ghraib? Actually without too much searching other begin to emerge. One of the players was Maj Gen Geoffrey Miller who came to Abu Ghraib to help ‘Gitmoize” their operation as pertains to prisoners that he likens to dogs.
Certainly any change in torture policy would have to come from the top. That would put Donald Rumsfeld on the list of those approving torture and from all the evidence Alberto Gonzales helped to clear the way for new definitions of what constituted torture as well. Until there is a serious attempt to track the torture from the top it’s all just window dressing. Whether or not the Iraqi’s have followed the Geneva Convention the U.S. always attempted to remain humane in their treatment of prisoners but based on the present administrations policies and actions that is no longer the case.

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[edit on 29-1-2007 by polanksi]