Top Foxes Report: Henhouse Raids WEREN'T Condoned

Knight-Ritter provides the details:

A Pentagon report Thursday cleared top civilian and military officials in the abuse of detainees in Iraq, Afghanistan and at Guantanamo Bay, but its conclusion drew a critical response from some senators who questioned the report's scope and objectivity...

By declining to blame top military leaders for the abuses, Church implicitly held individual soldiers, some of whom have been charged or already convicted of criminal offenses, as responsible for their actions in abusing the detainees...

Church told the Senate Armed Services Committee that his mandate was not to assign blame, but rather Rumsfeld told him to determine how abusive interrogation techniques were adopted and then migrated among several areas of U.S. military operations.

"There was no policy, written or otherwise, at any level that directed or condoned torture or abuse," Church said. "There was no link between the authorized interrogation techniques, and the abuses that, in fact, occurred."

While Church found no deliberate attempts to order the abuse of prisoners, his report found two "missed opportunities," in which commanders could have issued clearer guidance to subordinates who had contact with prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan.

But Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., the ranking Democrat on the committee, told Church that his review joins other Pentagon inquiries that have failed to address the possibility that high-ranking officers and politically appointed civilians, such as Rumsfeld, are culpable in the abuse scandal.

"There's been no assessment of accountability of any senior officials," Levin said, "either within or outside of the Department of Defense, for policies that may have contributed to abuses of prisoners."

The Pentagon released a 21-page summary of Church's conclusions, but the full 378-page report has been classified and will not be made public.

Deniability is alive and well.