corrente

Some mornings, when the temperature just matches the dew point, the dawn starts to break and the world looks like the inside of a pearl as fog covers the land. The higher the sun gets the more the mist breaks up into patches.

A couple of patches are still clinging to the darker spots of woodlands. One of the darkest, guarded by large and ugly trees, has been the story of the atrocities committed in our names in the foul prisons of Iraq. Two stories, one old and one new, suggest that even those trees can't for very much longer hold back the rays of sunlight from breaking through.

Lambert suggests that this item noted earlier by esteemed reader Shystee (via the forthcoming issue of Newsweek) implies that the next investigative commission into interrogator abuses will be just a same-old, same-old coverup. I don't read it that way:

In mid-August, the commission that Schlesinger chairs—handpicked by Rumsfeld from members of his own Defense Policy Board—is expected to issue its final report on abuses by U.S. interrogators stemming from the Abu Ghraib Prison scandal. NEWSWEEK has learned the Schlesinger panel is leaning toward the view that failures of command and control at the Pentagon helped create the climate in which the abuses occurred.

One reason I think this is more hopeful than it looks is this next item. Note the date: this was run last Thursday when everybody was looking at the shiny confetti at the convention.

This is from the WaPo's superb Ellen McCarthy. When it's time to hand out all the Pulitzers next year I am personally campaigning on her behalf--she's been the pitbull on this issue whose stuff I merely steal:

Thursday, July 29, 2004; Page E05 <--(not that they meant to bury it or anything):

Contracts released by the Defense Department raise new questions about whether civilian employees of CACI International Inc. supervised the interrogation of some prison detainees in Iraq.

The Pentagon provided copies of the Arlington company's government contracts to the Center for Public Integrity, which sought them under the Freedom of Information Act. The center, based in the District, made the documents public yesterday.

The $19.9 million contract for CACI to provide interrogators, awarded last August, calls for the civilian workers to "provide oversight and other directed intelligence support to [military] screening and interrogation operations, with special emphasis on High-Value detainees."

But the contract for interrogation services also says that CACI employees are to be "directed by military authority" and that "the contractor is responsible for providing supervision of all contractor personnel."

Controversy also arose over the government's use of a contract intended to provide information technology services to hire the civilian interrogators.

Using an umbrella contract managed by the Interior Department, the government awarded CACI 11 task orders for duties in Iraq including inventory management and intelligence analysis.

Critics said the newly released CACI contracts add to questions about the government's use of private contractors to carry out sensitive wartime operations.

"This once again just shows how far we've pushed it," said Peter W. Singer, a fellow with the Brookings Institution. "When you see contracts written this way, they are ignoring a fundamental fact. . . . You are hiring someone to do a military job even through they are not in the military."

Some contracting experts said such language creates confusion about how civilian contractors interact with enlisted soldiers and officers.

"This is telling us that the buck stops at the contractors. . . . There may be a chain of command, but the people who are the experts, who know the rules, are outside the government," said Daniel J. Guttman, a fellow at the Center for Study of the American Government at Johns Hopkins University.

This is the essence, the filthy heart of the beast we've been calling the Fog Machine. Confuse the lines of command. Make sure that nobody, either at the time or later when the investigators come calling, knows what's going on or who's in control or who can or even should be held personally responsible.

An earlier day called it "plausible deniability." Now we prefer to let the big shots off with tsk-tsks of "systemic dysfunction" or some similar bullshit. This has only one goal: to pretend that these deeds were not done, these abuses not committed, these laws not broken by individual men and women who need to be held personally responsible. Every damned one of them, from a few bad apples to the top of the chain of command.