No oversight?
Some folks continue to insist that Abu Ghraib was just the perverted actions of a few untrained professionals. Of course, this could never have happend if, for example, the JAG had been allowed to monitor interrogations. Until Afghanistan, the JAG (Judge Advocate General Corps) had that job.
The decision to force the removal of the JAG from this task would seem to indicate to me that the people making the decisions intended to do some things the JAG would not like.
… Horton says that the JAG officers specifically warned him that Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas J. Feith,one of the most powerful political appointees in the Pentagon, had significantly weakened the military’s rules and regulations governing prisoners of war. The officers told Horton that Feith and the Defense Department’s general counsel, William J. Haynes II, were creating “an atmosphere of legal ambiguity” that would allow mistreatment of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Who is Haynes? From Senator Kennedy’s opinion piece in the Washington Post
… He has developed and defended three of the administration’s most controversial policies: the refusal to treat any of the hundreds of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay as prisoners of war under the Geneva Conventions of 1949; the department’s military tribunal plan for trying suspected war criminals; and even the incarceration of U.S. citizens without counsel or judicial review.
And where is William J. Haynes now?