Big fish get away. Little fish get away too.
New rule: if you are ordered to torture prisoners, it’s OK to torture them. Pfc. Lynndie England, who was prepared to plead guilty to conspiracy in the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison, has now gotten a mistrial instead. England was not permitted to plead guilty in the face of evidence that she may have thought she was following orders. This is a bizarre twist, since her co-conspirator Spc. Charles Graner Jr. insisted that he’d been following orders, and he was found guilty as hell. The refusal to accept England’s guilty plea flies in the face of the well-known Nuremburg standard: following orders is no defense.
George W. Bush himself laid out the proper standard with unaccustomed clarity, days before he started the war: “ War crimes will be prosecuted, war criminals will be punished and it will be no defense to say, ‘I was just following orders.’” Of course, he was talking about Iraqi war criminals.
That said, it is also a war crime to give the orders. Whether or not Lynndie England walks, the vastly larger injustice is that the people who gave the orders for systematic torture of prisoners are not just left unpunished, but are prospering. When George W. Bush is on trial for crimes against humanity, then we can talk about how America stands for the rule of law.