The devastating scandal of Abu Ghraib wasn’t a failure of implementation, as Rice and other administration defenders have admitted. It was a direct—and predictable—consequence of a policy, hatched at the highest levels of the administration, by senior White House officials and lawyers, in the weeks and months after 9/11. Yet the administration has largely managed to escape responsibility for those decisions; a month from election day, almost no one in the press or the political class is talking about what is, without question, the worst scandal to emerge from President Bush’s nearly four years in office. Excerpt
The Biggest Scandal of the Bush Administration Began at the Top.](http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2004/0411.carter.html) Washington Monthly, November 2004
The Road to Abu Ghraib (Phillip Carter is a former U.S. Army officer who now writes on national security issues for The Washington Monthly.
A generation from now, historians may look back to April 28, 2004, as the day the United States lost the war in Iraq. On that date, “CBS News” broadcast the first ugly photographs of abuses by American soldiers at Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib prison. There were images of a man standing hooded on a box with wires attached to his hands; of guards leering as they forced naked men to simulate sexual acts; of a man led around on a leash by a female soldier; of a dead Iraqi detainee, packed in ice; and more. The pictures had been taken the previous fall by U.S. Army military police soldiers assigned to the prison, but had made it into the hands of Army criminal investigators only months later, when a soldier named Joseph Darby anonymously passed them a CD-ROM full of prison photos. The images aroused worldwide indignation, and illustrated in graphic detail both the lengths to which the United States would go to get intelligence, and the extent to which those efforts had been corrupted by the exigencies of the difficult war in Iraq. Full Article](http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2004/0411.carter.html)