As per usual at Chez Channonyarrow, I have been following the Iraqi prisoner scandal with some degree of intelligence, a high degree of opinion, and access to a computer.
By now everyone should have seen the pictures and should know the basic facts. I'm not interested in the basics of this - other than to say that the odds of a like-minded group of people finding themselves on the same shift and cell block are, in the military, far lower than might be expected.
Allow me to clarify before getting to my main point.
The military - and I do not care in the slightest if you have a military history, has a cousin who does, or are Colin Powell, this is the purpose of the military - exists to counter threats to the polity containing the military.
This is usually by acts that can and do lead to the death of others, whether combatants or not. These actions are part of a fairly rigorous training program. The training program teaches individuals to commit actions that will lead to the death of other individuals.
All with me so far?
If you didn't understand that that paragraph translates to Militaries teach their personnel to kill, start over.
This is an action that is, roughly, equivalent to cannibalism. Survival of the species is dictated into us at the genetic level (indeed, at least one theory - Selfish Gene, I believe - posits that the existence of life is to carry on reproducing genes, regardless of the matter that surrounds them) and is an overwhelming animal instinct that is logical. To give one way of illustrating this, many species will kill members of other species for purposes other than food - essentially war. Primates are the only species who will kill their own species, and the existence of such war in primates was not known until the early 1970s. IN other words, it's not a widespread habit.
Except among humans.
Humans, every day, engage in war against their own. We break that barrier that stops animals from killing their own and say that under certain non-human circumstances such killing is right. Because government does not constitute anything other than an idea. It is a concept. The refinements we have added to it at this stage in the 21st century are not innate to it.
We cannibalise our own, and unlike cannibals* we don't even get the protein from the dead.
Consequently, the odds of finding a group of individuals who share the same way of relating to the world - and apparently they missed the memo stating that the US officially condemns and privately practises torture, rather than in this case publicly practises and condemns afterwards - is a lot higher than it would be if one took a cross-section of the general population.
It's all right. It makes sense.
We train them to do this.
Having said all that (and leaving out the vast remainder of my opinions on this subject which would account for a tome of about 50K words) I don't think Rumsfeld should resign.
There are several reasons for this.
First of all, the Democrats. They are insane to call for his resignation, because it won't happen. This administration has demonstrated repeatedly that not only will they go to any lengths necessary to do what they want, they will create the opportunities to do so. This is, of course, a stunning reversal from, say, Jimmy Carter's government which, in the interest of diverting the Soviets, invaded Afghanistan in 1978 with the explicit intention of dragging the Soviets into war there. So, basically, we can all thank the great humanitarian and peanut farmer for terrorism as it is performed today; a number of sources, all of which elude me at the moment, state that the mujahedeen, who came out of Afghanistan's war with the USSR, are the single greatest threat to world safety.
Of course, all that was said before Bush was elected - which brings us back full circle. The Bush administration will not allow Rumsfeld to resign.
Secondly, I want Bush to lose the next election, just like he lost the last one. Only this time, I want it to stick. And I think that Rumsfeld's resignation will not cause this for two reasons.
a) The government will look like it proactively solves problems. If they did, we wouldn't have had 9/11 in the first place. If it looks like it does, Bush's approval rating increases because he doesn't care if he has to cut the ear of the cow off to save the rest of the cow - never mind that the ear is useless.
b) Then we'll have a shiny new Secretary of Defence, one with the labels still on. And folks, how badly could he fuck up (compared to this, which the administration will be able to point to as a sign of how different things are under the new SecDef) in six months? Not that badly at all.
Bearing all that in mind, I'm hoping Rumsfeld doesn't resign. He should go out with the rest of the Administration, in November.
*find me a group of cannibals who practise cannibalism for anything other than rituals after battle and I've got a bridge to sell you. Cannibalism as an institution in society DOES NOT, like the Minotaur, EXIST. NO ONE has found a society that practises it. And given that anthropologists would just come all over themselves to find cannibals, WE'VE LOOKED.