Daily Op/Ed Wrap-up

Walter M. Brasch: Bush is runnin the ship of state aground

"...Innumerable times, President Bush told the nation he was giving his military all the resources they needed to fight. Either this was political spin of the truth, or his subordinates didn't take him seriously. Gen. Karpinski told Newsweek she didn't have enough troops or resources, that her brigade wasn't properly trained, and that when she complained to her superiors, they ignored her. "They just wanted it to go away," she said. Almost a year earlier, the inspector general of the Department of Justice revealed the detention of individuals in the United States was "indiscriminate and haphazard," and that there were "significant instances" of "a pattern of physical and verbal abuse," including beatings of illegal immigrants, most of them Muslim or Arab, almost all imprisoned for minor offenses, by various employees and officials of the Department of Justice. Included were employees of the FBI, Bureau of Prisons, Drug Enforcement Administration, and Immigration and Naturalization Service. In England, Lord Justice Johan Steyn, senior judge in the House of Lords, and one of the nation's most respected judges, said that conditions imposed by the Department of Defense at Guantanamo Bay were of "utter lawlessness," a "monstrous failure of justice," and "not quite torture, but as close as you can get." BBC diplomatic correspondent Barnaby Mason pointed out, "It is rare for British judges to speak on contentious political issues and almost unheard of for them to attack a foreign government." President Bush may condemn the actions of a "few." He, like the rest of the world, was be personally "disgusted." He may rebuke his subordinates. His staff and cabinet secretaries may launch investigations. And, there will be courts martial, especially since the world now knows what happened in Iraq. But, the problem, as others are pointing out, goes far beyond the actions of "just a handful" to expose critical problems in how this country has undertaken its mission in the President's self-proclaimed "War on Terror." This President has defined himself as a commander-in-chief and as a war president. As the leader of this war, in which almost 800 American soldiers, and several thousand others, most of them civilians, have died. He is the one guiding this ship-of-state. The loss of civil rights of American citizens and human rights of all persons was, and is, his responsibility. It's one from which he can't deflect criticism or go AWOL."

Jonathan Tasini: A Cronkite Moment?

"I experienced a Walter Cronkite moment last week that signaled to me that something is in the air about what people feel about the Iraq war. No, it didn't come from Ted Kopple's reciting of the Iraq war dead, nor the polls showing declining support for the war, nor from any of the other pundits, prognosticators, analysts and experts who fill the airwaves and pages of what we see and read. My moment came after reading Rick Reilly's column in Sports Illustrated. Yes, SI, magazine to the sports-obsessed (to which I proudly belong)..."

International Herald Tribune: The U.S. military archipelago

"The interrogation and detention methods that the Pentagon acknowledges having regularly used include forms of physical and psychological abuse that violate American values, international standards of human dignity and the lawful rules of war. These include sleep deprivation and forcing prisoners' bodies into "stress positions" for hours at a time. Until recently, detainees were commonly interrogated with hoods over their heads. Stripping them naked was permitted so long as a general signed off on the request. Judging from the photos, that wasn't much of a barrier..."

G. Pascal Zachary: Jail Don

"Rumsfeld deserves to be sent to prison for his acts as Secretary of Defense. So the President is doing the right thing: he is keeping Rumsfeld in place in order to give the legal system time to do maximum damage against our country?s arrogant, pompous and unrepentant war chief..."

Jim Lobe: Rummy on the Rocks

"Murtha, a decorated Marine veteran and senior member of the subcommittee that deals with Pentagon appropriations, poured scorn on the administration's optimistic predictions about Iraq.

Without explicitly stating that the war was ''unwinnable'', he at one point said the public had turned against it and that it was unlikely the administration would provide the troops needed to stabilize the situation to such an extent that other countries would be willing to help out..."

Washington Post: An Inadequate Response

"...The Pentagon leadership would like to limit the scandal, and the scrutiny, to a handful of soldiers at one prison during two months of last year. But investigations by the International Committee of the Red Cross and independent human rights groups have demonstrated that abuses occurred elsewhere. The Army now has admitted that at least 25 prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan have died in U.S. custody. These are the signs not of isolated acts but of a broken system, one that is leading to criminal abuses. If Mr. Rumsfeld and President Bush are unwilling to fix it, Congress must step in."