"the atmosphere and license for these activities came right from the top..."
----Ahhhh, just when you were doing so well, (especially for a Newbie) you show yourself to be someone willing to assume something you can't possibly know, but only want to believe. If all this came right from the top, I guess everyone who DIDN'T participate in the abuse should be up on charges, right? Atmosphere and license is one very wide and amorphous concept. Were there no monitors checking up on the behavior of our soldiers at Abu Ghraib every day, carrying around a playbook and demanding reports on how each and every prisoner was being treated each and every day? Of course not. Were all those prisoners wrongly imprisoned innocents who HADN'T, COULDN'T POSSIBLY HAVE participated in beheadings, incinerating coalition forces and hanging their charred remains from bridges,etc. While I was revolted by the behavior on a personal level, for the media to exploit it as if it's the most terrible thing that could have happened WITHIN THE WIDER GENERAL HORROR OF WAR
is almost laughable.
you show yourself to be someone willing to assume something you can't possibly know, but only want to believe.
Please, don't lecture me on "wanting to believe". First of all, is there any doubt in your mind what anybody here, including me, would believe, if any other country in the world treated American prisoners in exactly the same fashion by any other country and if as much documented evidence came to light about that country's policies regarding prisoners? Are you in any doubt that the North Vietnamese torture of prisoners was policy? Are you in any doubt that the Japanese treatment of prisoners in WWII was policy? Are you in any doubt that the Iraqi treatment of prisoners during Saddam's reign was policy? Did you have (prior to the war) documented evidence that those policies went right up to Saddam? Secondly, if you think I want to believe that our government sanctions torture, you're very sadly mistaken. I didn't want to believe, nor DID I believe that My Lai was anything but an aberration. Nor do I believe differently to this day. But you'd be right in assuming that I do not believe the refusal to honor Red Cross requests for standard wartime information is the act of a handful of low level individuals.
Ok, I said the top, specifically Rumsfeld and Gonzales. Well, since I'm not great on recollecting details and can't recall off the top of my head where to find the documented memos from Rumsfeld on that score, I'll drop that one. But Gonzales and his memos are a very different matter. It has nothing to do with anything I want to believe.
You ask about people who did not participate in abuses and whether they should be up on charges. Well, you tell me? What were the principles of Nuremberg?
Atmosphere and license is one very wide and amorphous concept.
There's no argument that atmosphere and license are very hard to quantify, but to argue that they aren't important or even that they aren't major factors in these things is to deny reality. Corporations know better about such things - the smart ones, the really big ones, spend huge amounts of money on experts in such vague and amorphous areas because they know that these things make huge differences in money - they may be hard to quantify, but money is not. And these factors, that you wish to dismiss so easily because they're more difficult to quantify, are hugely important in the behaviour of an organization collectively, regardless of what that organization is a business or an army.
Now, if you insist, I'll locate and post documented evidence on Gonzales' influence in these things. And if I do, I think we'll see then who is influenced by what they WANT to believe. Since Gonzales at the time had no actual direct decision making power, I guess we'll just have to ask ourselves if we want to believe that his bosses (such as the president of the United States) just ignored his advice or not and which was more likely, given the microscopic evidence.
Sometimes finding out what one's own government is doing is like gathering intelligence. You gather scattered bits of information and then you make guesses as to what the most likely conclusions are that one can make about the broader picture. If you want to call that "wanting to believe", go ahead.
But dare I suggest that on many other things, that many people will quite happily assume that where there is smoke, there must be fire?