Antonio Taguba is a US Army General, and Robert Jackson was a US Supreme Court Justice and the US Chief Prosecutor at Nuremberg.  Taguba was born in the Philippines, the first of six children of a devoutly religious family.  He came to the United States with his family in 1961 at age 11.  He attended college with the help of Army ROTC, and graduated in 1972 as a 2nd lieutenant.  In the Army he worked his way up to major general, when he was given the assignment of investigating what happened at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. 

The June 25, 2007 issue of the New Yorker has an article about General Taguba by veteran journalist Seymour Hersh, “The General’s Report, How Antonio Taguba, who investigated the Abu Ghraib scandal, became one of its casualties.”  Taguba investigated what happened at Abu Ghraib and reported honestly. 

I thought they wanted to know,” Taguba said.  “I assumed they wanted to know.  I was ignorant of the setting.”  The setting he refers to was a meeting on May 6, 2004 with the upper echelon of the Defense Department, including Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Stephen Cambone, General Richard Myers, General Peter Schoomaker and others.  These men wanted to hear a report describing “abuse” at Abu Ghraib, but heard instead from General Taguba that what he found was “torture.”  Taguba was retired from the military in January 2007.  He is an honorable man.   

The article in the New Yorker ends with a reflection by General Taguba: “From the moment a soldier enlists, we inculcate loyalty, duty, honor, integrity, and selfless service.  And yet when we get to the senior-officer level we forget those values.  I know that my peers in the Army will be mad at me for speaking out, but the fact is that we violated the laws of land warfare in Abu Ghraib.  We violated the tenets of the Geneva Convention.  We violated our own principles and we violated the core of our military values.  The stress of combat is not an excuse and I believe, even today, that those civilian and military leaders responsible should be held accountable.”

I agree with General Taguba about the importance of accountability.  It is critical.  Until we hold our leaders accountable for their crimes, including torture, we will not live up to our own standards and we will leave the door open for future crimes. 

Following World War II, Justice Robert Jackson argued, “If certain acts in violation of treaties are crimes they are crimes whether the United States does them or whether Germany does them, and we are not prepared to lay down a rule of criminal conduct against others which we would not be willing to have invoked against us.”

Justice Jackson, like Antonio Taguba, was an honorable man.  He believed in a single standard to be applied not only to our enemies, but to ourselves as well.  He stated at Nuremberg, “We must never forget that the record on which we judge these defendants today is the record on which history will judge us tomorrow.  To pass these defendants a poisoned chalice is to put it to our own lips as well.”

We held the German leaders to account after World War II, but as General Taguba points out we are not holding our own high officials to the same standards.  In failing to hold US leaders to account for the torture at Abu Ghraib, renditions and other atrocities, we pay the price in our loss of respect in our own eyes and in the eyes of the world. 

The initiation of the war in Iraq is itself a crime, what was called at Nuremberg a crime against peace, the crime of aggressive war.  Justice Jackson said of aggressive war, “It is utterly condemned as an instrument of policy.”  We Americans have a long way to go to live up to our ideals, those we imposed upon the Germans at Nuremberg.  We will not get there until we impose accountability on our own leaders for failing to uphold our obligations under by international law and our own Constitution.