No Systemic Abuse

That's the REAL conclusion of the independent panel investigation of the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal. The AP report is here. The worst that is said about Rumsfeld and the Pentagon -- they "could" be faulted for inadequate supervision. But the real fault is at the brigade level.

Here are a couple of observations from the Wall Street Journal regarding a key fact that the AP story omitted: only 66 confirmed cases of mistreatment in 50,000 prisoners handled by US forces in Afghanistan and Iraq -- 0.13%. Your excerpts:

Since Operation Enduring Freedom began in October 2001, the U.S. has handled about 50,000 detainees in Afghanistan, Iraq and other venues of the war on terror. Among those, about 300 allegations of abuse have arisen. And as of this month 155 investigations have resulted in 66 substantiated cases of mistreatment. Only about a third of those cases were related to interrogation, while another third happened at the point of capture, "frequently under uncertain, dangerous and violent circumstances."

So notes Tuesday's report from the Independent Panel to Review DOD Detention Operations, empowered in May by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and chaired by former Pentagon chief James Schlesinger. The report offers invaluable perspective on the abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib and is devastating to those who've sought to pin blame on an alleged culture of lawlessness going all the way to the top of the Bush Administration . . .

"The behavior of our troops is so much better than it was in World War II," Mr. Schlesinger told us yesterday, by way of comparison.

Moreover, the report completely eviscerates any claim that Rumsfeld and the Pentagon promulgated policies that caused such abuse.

Looking at mistreatment both at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere, the report says that "No approved procedures called for or allowed the kinds of abuse that in fact occurred. There is no evidence of a policy of abuse promulgated by senior officials or military authorities."

Thus, the grandstanding press, Senators, and International Red Cross need to start eating large quantities of crow:

Rhode Island Senator Jack Reed, for one, would seem to owe some apologies. In a May hearing he accused Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, Joint Chiefs Vice Chairman Peter Pace, and the rest of the Pentagon of sanctioning war crimes. Also owing apologies are all those journalists who applauded his demagogy as some kind of gotcha moment, and who threw around words like "torture" so glibly.

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The Schlesinger report also shines a well-deserved spotlight on the International Committee of the Red Cross. It notes that much of the ICRC criticism used to bludgeon the Pentagon stems--as we've noted in this column--from a radical interpretation of the laws of war under which "interrogation operations would not be allowed," and which "would deprive the U.S. of an indispensable source of intelligence in the war on terrorism."

In particular, the ICRC is rapped for insisting that the U.S. adhere to a controversial document known as Protocol 1, which the U.S. long ago explicitly rejected and which would grant terrorists and other non-uniformed combatants all the privileges of normal prisoners of war. The ICRC, the report says, promulgates this standard dishonestly "under the guise of customary international law."

Somehow, the 0.13% factor, the lack of attribution of fault to Rumsfeld for creating the atmosphere of torture and the rebuke of the ICRC in the commission report are not given prominence in the AP story. Must have been an oversight because there is no media bias, right?