DOING HER JOB.

It was not a few bad apples. It was not the chaos of war. It was official U.S. government policy. The release of the Senate Armed Services Committee's Report on Treatment of Detainees in U.S. Custody makes that perfectly clear. You can argue over when it began. Maybe it on On February 7, 2002, when President Bush signed a memorandum stating that the Third Geneva Convention did not apply to the conflict with al Qaeda and concluding that Taliban detainees were not entitled to prisoner of war status or the legal protections afforded by the Third Geneva Convention. Or maybe it was a month before that, when the Department of Defense General Counsel’s Office solicited information on detainee “exploitation” from the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency, "an agency whose expertise was in training American personnel to withstand interrogation techniques considered illegal under the Geneva Conventions."

The JPRA oversees the military's Survival Evasion Resistance and Escape (SERE) training. In short, they train soldiers to withstand torture. Which means they need to know how to torture. "The techniques used in SERE school, based, in part, on Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean war to elicit false confessions, include stripping students of their clothing, placing them in stress positions, putting hoods over their heads, disrupting their sleep, treating them like animals, subjecting them to loud music and flashing lights, and exposing them to extreme temperatures. It can also include face and body slaps and until recently, for some who attended the Navy’s SERE school, it included waterboarding." And the Administration went to them for advice. Not on their area of expertise -- resisting torture -- but on their collateral specialty: Torturing. Included in their advice were hoods, and leashes, and waterboarding. They are not pictured in the photograph above, but they may as well have been behind the camera composing it.

It is one of the great embarrassments of this administration that they let grunt-level soldiers fall because they were following policy. Lynndie England was not a bad apple. She was just doing her job. And her boss, ultimately, was George W. Bush.

Related: Andrew Sullivan has much more on the report. Dan Froomkin tracks the many administration lies that the report exposed. And I'd add that the executive summary should be read in full. Much has been done in our names, and understanding the extent of the damage requires facing up to the full weight of our sins.