A CADET WILL NOT LIE OR CHEAT, BUT HOW ABOUT SENIOR MILITARY OFFICERS?

"A Cadet will not lie, cheat, or steal, or tolerate those who do.” This is the oath taken by all cadets at West Point and other military academies. Anyone who is caught cheating on exams, for example, is booted out of the academy. Any cadet caught lying also suffers the same fate.

Why then do senior officers of the Army and Marines think that they themselves are exempt from the principles and restrictions of the oath they took when they were young cadets? Seymour Hersh writes on his interview with retired General Taguba about Taguba's report on the the problems in Abu Ghraib.

Hersch writes that Taguba believes that high ranking generals, including those on the Joint Chiefs, enabled by silence the lies of George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld when Bush and Rumsfeld claimed that they were unaware of the problems found in the military's prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan until they saw the photos of prisoners being tortured and mistreated.

According to Taguba, Bush and Rumsfeld knew long before they saw the photos that there were serious problems including those of torture, inhumane treatment and degrading acts. Yet Bush and Rumsfeld did nothing to solve the problem or to order investigations on who ordered the abuse. Probably because these two "leaders" were themselves responsible for initiating the policies.

Writes Sy Hersh in The New Yorker:

"Taguba went on, “There was no doubt in my mind that this stuff”—the explicit images—“was gravitating upward. It was standard operating procedure to assume that this had to go higher. The President had to be aware of this.” He said that Rumsfeld, his senior aides, and the high-ranking generals and admirals who stood with him as he misrepresented what he knew about Abu Ghraib had failed the nation.

“From the moment a soldier enlists, we inculcate loyalty, duty, honor, integrity, and selfless service,” Taguba said. “And yet when we get to the senior-officer level we forget those values. I know that my peers in the Army will be mad at me for speaking out, but the fact is that we violated the laws of land warfare in Abu Ghraib. We violated the tenets of the Geneva Convention. We violated our own principles and we violated the core of our military values. The stress of combat is not an excuse, and I believe, even today, that those civilian and military leaders responsible should be held accountable.” ♦"