Doug Feith's Testimony

I saw part of Douglas Feith's testimony before a Congressional Committee relating to torture in the Department of Defense. (Remember, Feith is a former political appointee in the Department of Defense who is accused of some of the worst mistakes in the build up to the Iraq war, and who -- in spite of his obvious political and bureaucratically successful career -- is thought to have been characterized by Tommy Frank as "the stupidest fucking guy on the planet".)

He was questioned as to who had responsibility for the torture that occurred in Iraq. He missed the obvious answer that everyone is responsible. The people who actually tortured prisoners are responsible: even if they were ordered to do so, both military justice and normal morality require people not to obey such unlawful orders.

At each higher level of the chain of command, there is responsibility. The nature of that responsibility depends on the circumstances. Anyone who ordered torture is directly and fundamentally culpable. Anyone who issued imprecise orders that were understood as requiring torture is culpable, as would anyone who issued orders that set up the conditions which would lead reasonable people to think torture was acceptable or required of them. Moreover, everyone in the chain of command bears some blame for torture that conducted by their subordinates, no matter how distant the torturer in the chain of command.

Doug Feith, perhaps understandably, seemed to be trying to defend his President and his boss the Secretary of Defense, but our system will work better if superiors accept responsibility whenever misconduct occurs on the part of their subordinates. At the very least, the leaders of our government failed to set up adequate safeguards to prevent torture. At worst.....