Note: this post continues, more or less, from what began here.

We've been busy here, and I'm behind on my reading. But I finally got to Andrew Sullivan's essay in the New York Times Book Review (a location justified by the notion that he is "reviewing" two new books) on the extent of torture as a policy and practice in Guantanamo, Iraq and elsewhere. Sullivan quotes extensively from both volumes, one of which is comprised primarily of the government's own report into allegations of U.S. human rights abuses.

This article is something that you should probably read, if, like me, you haven't been reading a lot about what the government's report reveals.

Sulllivan makes a case strongly refuting the claims of a certain City Journal article which argued that Abu Ghraib should be understood solely as a failure of Army discipline. In his view, the available documents demonstrate that an ambiguous but meaningful message (which said that the old rules don't apply in how we treat prisoners now), filtered down from Bush, Rumsfeld, and various deputies. And that this message was understood by military intelligence personnel and others charged with detaining or interrogating prisoners to mean that it was time to make the omlettes -- break eggs. Or legs.

Unlike Professor Green, Sullivan doesn't invoke the Zimbardo-informed perspective that suggests torture was the natural thing to expect guards in Iraq to do, and that the Army's failure began with its lack of presumption that this must be prevented. He places responsibility more squarely on the makers of policy, and does a good job of proposing how the sundry maneuvers by the administration to get around the niceties of the Geneva Convention were the seedlings of torture. I don't know whether one perspective is more to the point than the other -- but in either case, our failure as a nation to honor our own ideals in the execution of our military actions is so extreme and obvious as to be freshly alarming when you look at it again.

Sullivan's also takes a swing at the political faction which, in its fervent support of Bush's military policies, failed to hold the administration accountable to execute them in a way that could be stomached by decent people. He includes himself in this critique. To which I say: good.