The Jordan verdict

Today, Lt.-Col. Jordan was cleared of charges related to abuse at Abu Ghraib. Eleven soldiers have been convicted of carrying out abuses, but nobody in charge has been held responsible.

In other words, the soldiers were acting on their own. Nobody was monitoring their actions. They had the opportunity, the means, and the desire to abuse the prisoners, and had pictures not come to light, not only would the public not know about the abuses, nobody further up the chain of command would know, either.

That raises a couple of interesting questions. First, what kind of an army is it where the commanding officers don’t know what the men and women in their command are up to?

Second, how seriously is our system taking the rights of prisoners when soldiers have the opportunity -— to say nothing of the desire -— to abuse prisoners with impunity.

But the third and probably most troubling question is whether the results of Lt.-Col. Jordan’s case indicate a command structure that puts inordinate responsibility and opportunity into the hands of 22-year-old armed men and women with no significant oversight.

When you run an army, any army, one of the first things you do with a new recruit is you discipline him or her. You inculcate him or her with the rules and regulations that govern proper behavior. And you never hand that person a weapon until you know that he or she will use it properly.

So I find it troubling that Lt.-Col. Jordan -— as the officer in charge of the Joint Interrogation and Debriefing Center at the Abu Ghraib prison -— was not responsible for the discipline of the soldiers under his command.

Nobody was.

A million and a half people, all of whom are armed and trained to kill, and nobody’s in charge of them?

I find that impossible to believe.

There’s another possibility. Maybe the army actually does do a good job of disciplining its soldiers. Maybe soldiers really are trained to know what acceptable behavior is.

And maybe what the soldiers at Abu Ghraib did was actually considered acceptable. Maybe they were actually trained to perform heinous acts of indignity on prisoners.

Yes, that’s hard to believe, too. We live in a society that values individual liberty, don’t we? A system where the accused is innocent until proven guilty. A system of checks and balances that keep the powerful from oppressing the weak.

Given those two choices -— that either the army is effective at disciplining its soldiers or it isn’t -— I know which one seems more likely.

Especially considering one more nugget of information. The fact that Lt.-Col. Jordan wasn’t acquitted of all charges.

Lt.-Col. Jordan, who was responsible for the discipline of the men and women who abused prisoners under his care, was found guilty of disobeying an order not to discuss the investigation into the abuse scandal with others.

This crime carries a potential penalty of five years in prison.

Now that’s what I call discipline.