Editorial: Shooting the messenger

Friday, June 22, 2007 | 7:50 a.m.

Army Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba saw his career end at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, not because he was responsible for the horrific abuses there, but because he told the truth about them.

Taguba was tasked with investigating abuse at the prison and found a situation out of control, highlighted by failed leadership and, his March 2004 report noted, "systemic and illegal abuse."

He returned to the Pentagon to find the nation's military leadership willing to trash his report and reputation to cover up the truth. "They always shoot the messenger," Taguba told Seymour Hersh in the current issue of The New Yorker. "To be accused of being overzealous and disloyal - that cuts deep into me. I was being ostracized for doing what I was asked to do."

The problems at Abu Ghraib reached the highest levels of the Pentagon, where Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his aides were, in many cases, approving the methods interrogators used.

Other than describing the scandal as limited to a few rogue soldiers, the military's official response in April 2004 to Abu Ghraib was to send Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, the commander of the Guantanamo Bay detainee prison, to "clean up" Abu Ghraib.

The irony is that Miller went to Abu Ghraib in 2003 to recommend ways to get suspects to talk, and his recommendations may have laid the foundation for the abuses there. To further the irony, Air Force Lt. Gen. Randall Schmidt, who led the initial military investigation of Guantanamo in late 2004, found Miller responsible for the abusive and degrading treatment of prisoners there and recommended he be admonished.

But Schmidt's findings were left out of an Army inspector general's report, and Miller was absolved. Taguba, meanwhile, was sent to a desk job at the Pentagon to "be watched" before being ordered to retire.

We wonder what else has been hidden and who else has been shuffled off for supporting the uncomfortable truth. This is reprehensible and disgraceful behavior and the Bush administration should be held accountable. For starters, Taguba deserves an apology, and America deserves the full truth.