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Who's telling the truth? The differing accounts of Sivits and Graner go to the heart of the scandal: How high up does responsibility go? Everyone agrees that the despicable treatment the 372nd inflicted at Abu Ghraib violated the Geneva Conventions, U.S. rules on interrogation and common decency. And no matter what superiors order, soldiers are ultimately culpable for their own actions. But across Capitol Hill, many also fault senior Pentagon civilians and brass for loosening the rules of interrogation in Iraq and the top guns of the Bush Administration for setting a tone of tolerance as far back as Sept. 11 that may have encouraged the abuse. While the Administration maintained that its rules and practices of interrogation adhered to international standards, a broad spectrum of critics argue that the Pentagon adopted harsh methods that played fast and loose with the law. Even if no one ordered these particular incidents, critics argue that the abuses can be read as Administration policy carried to extreme.
In a week of congressional hearings, lawmakers struggled to trace the links in the chain of command. The White House, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and top brass in the Pentagon continued to insist that the abuses were confined to the sadistic impulses of the midnight shift at the prison. Senators and Representatives who crowded secure rooms on the Hill to watch nearly 1,800 unpublished pictures flash by, along with about half a dozen grainy videotapes, got a raw eyeful of just how perverse those particular soldiers had been. One of the videos seems to show a G.I. preparing to sodomize a male detainee. A still shot portrays an anguished female prisoner lifting her shirt to expose her breasts. Another photo zeroes in on the face and torso of a detainee smeared with what appear to be feces. In a picture of a body bag unzipped to reveal the ice-packed corpse of a man with a badly bruised face, a female soldier flashes a wide grin and a thumbs-up. And a host of pictures show the now familiar culprits engaged in raunchy sex acts with one another--convincing some legislators that this was a case of a few unbalanced and undereducated reservists indulging their perversions. "It was hard to think it was done for the disclosing of information," says Democratic Senator Mark Dayton.
Hoping to cauterize the wound there and keep infection from higher-ups, Pentagon officials claimed that the misfits went wrong because of broad failings inside the prison. If anyone up the line was to blame, they said, it was the MP commander, Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, who paid too little attention to her rogue company. "My assessment," said Lieut. General Keith Alexander, the Army's deputy chief of staff for intelligence, "is there was a complete breakdown of discipline on the MP side." He was seconded on that point by Major General Antonio Taguba, author of the scathing Army inquiry, who bluntly defined the problem as a "failure of leadership; lack of discipline; no training whatsoever; and no supervision."