Needed: Abu Ghraib Special Prosecutor

WIDE GAPS SEEN IN U.S. INQUIRIES ON PRISON ABUSE by STEVEN LEE MYERS and ERIC SCHMITT, June 6, 2004, The New York Times begins:

Disparate inquiries into abuses of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan have so far left crucial questions of policy and operations unexamined, according to lawmakers from both parties and outside military experts, who say that the accountability of senior officers and Pentagon officials may remain unanswered as a result.

No investigation completely independent of the Pentagon exists to determine what led to the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison, and so far there has been no groundswell in Congress or elsewhere to create one.

But on Capitol Hill, even some Republicans have begun to question whether the Pentagon’s inquiries are too narrowly structured to establish the causes of the abuses, as Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and others have pledged to do, and then to determine if anyone in the chain of command was responsible for them.

Does anyone believe that Sec. Rumsfeld or his boss want the truth to come out? If there ever was a situation that demanded an independent prosecutor, this one certainly does.