Re: Two face

I'm not sure what sort of distinction you're trying to make here. The Army's own internal report conducted by Gen. Taguba -- like the ICRC report -- found that the use of illegal interrogation methods was systemic.

As the ICRC said earlier this week (emphasis added),

In certain cases, such as in Abu Ghraib military intelligence section, methods of physical and psychological coercion used by the interrogators appeared to be part of the standard operating procedures by military intelligence personnel to obtain confessions and extract information.

So there were a small number of cases where groups of individuals made this SOP at places like Abu Ghraib and in many other cases there were individual acts of illegal actions that were not organized or systemic. In both cases you have either a small group of people acting illegally as part of an organized conspiracy or acting illegally on their own. In no case is there evidence that such treatment was condoned by higher-ups or that this was an explicit or implicit policy of coalition forces.

As Gen. Taguba testified of his investigation of Abu Ghraib,

We did not find any evidence of a policy or a direct order given to these soldiers to conduct what they did. I believe that they did it on their own volition and I believe that they collaborated with several MI (military intelligence) interrogators at the lower level

What he did find, among other things, was gross negligence by those who were supposed to be supervising the prisons (and now want to claim that they are simply being scapegoated),

"Lack of discipline, no training whatsoever and no supervision. Supervisory omission was rampant"

. . .

Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski was in charge of the 800th Military Police Brigade, which operated 12 prison facilities in Iraq, including Abu Ghraib. Karpinski, {Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence] Stephen Cambone said, was "as best as I understand it ... not frequently at Abu Ghraib."

Take a group of young men and women in a war zone, tell them they need to help obtain intelligence from prisoners "at any cost" and then don't supervise them, and this is a rather predictable outcome.