That's right. William F. Buckley is SEDHE's "Hero of the Week." Rather unlikely, but if you read his most recent column, you'll understand why. Unlike other conservatives, Buckley is not an apologist for the acts that occurred at Abu Gharib. Whereas Rush suggests that the acts were justified (read previous entry for details), Buckley contrasts the Abu Gharib situation with that of Lt. William Calley, who was prosecuted for the My Lai massacre in Vietnam in 1968. Calley was given life in prison for his actions then, but then "what seemed all of America rose up in protest against the sentence," not because they thought he didn't do anything wrong, but because they thought that life in prison was an extreme punishment; bowing to American popular opinion, President Nixon reduced his sentence.

The justification for My Lai, however, was that "you are waging war, there are snipers and other hidden assailants, and you find yourself authorizing your men to use their machine guns to everybody down -- one way to do it." Buckley suggests -- contrary to Rush -- that the guards at Abu Gharib were not in life-or-death situations. "In Iraq, there seems to have been nothing there in the sense of dodging bullets and returning fire. It seemed sheer sadism, pleasure taken from torture," he says. "But there is no accounting for forcing naked men to enact sexual practices, some apparently perverse, for the gratification of an assembly apparently stripped of any thought of humane behavior."

This is only the introduction to the column, but Buckley's point should be well-taken. Though Iraqi insurgents freely fire upon U.S. troops, that is no excuse for the professional U.S. Army to retaliate with sadistic abuse. Most of the prisoners at Abu Gharib were low-level detainees, anyway: they had no valuable information and were rounded up almost out of necessity. Some of them had committed no crimes at all.

The thesis of Buckley's column is that Donald Rumsfeld should not lose his job over this. I tend to agree: Rumsfeld is a suit back in Washington, and while he is technically responsible as Secretary of Defense, he was not there and he did not issue the orders to do this (as far as we know). By the time that these pictures surfaced on CBS News, the parties involved were in the disciplinary process. The Secretary of Defense cannot be expected to have control of everything. In a corporate structure, tasks are delegated, and managers expect that their subordinates will do the job assigned to them. In this case, one of the managers went a little crazy. That's the manager's fault, not Rumsfeld's.

John Kerry has been calling for the President's resignation. This is ridiculous on its face. The President of the United States has ten thousand things to attend to every day; this is why he delegates the duties of the defense of the U.S. to Rumsfeld. The President has no control over day-to-day operations of the Defense Department. Saying that Bush is responsible is a cheap election-year ploy designed to transfer blame to the President, where it is most strategic for Kerry.