Ruben Navarrette Jr. / Syndicated columnist
Get to the bottom of this ugly affair

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DALLAS — Reminder to all U.S. military personnel serving in Iraq: The idea is to win hearts and minds — not turn stomachs.

The latter is exactly what happened when photos surfaced showing the sadistic humiliation of about 20 Iraqi prisoners by U.S. Army reservists. The treatment at the Abu Ghraib prison ranged from beating prisoners to threatening them with rape and electrocution to sexual abuse.

First the good news: President Bush, members of Congress and senior military officials were quick to declare this behavior sickening and totally unacceptable, and six members of the Army Reserve military police unit now face courts-martial on charges of assault, performing indecent acts and mistreating detainees.

Six superior officers have been reprimanded. Another, Army Reserve Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, who was in charge of the accused soldier, says she received a letter of admonishment. The Army has launched at least three investigations.

All that is as it should be. The six reservists, if found guilty, should be severely punished. They set out to degrade a bunch of Iraqi prisoners and wound up demeaning their own country and the American people. They also didn't help the larger cause of convincing the Arab world that the Americans now occupying Baghdad are an improvement over the regime of Saddam Hussein.

Army Reserve leaders must also take their lumps. Karpinski is ultimately responsible for her soldiers. It comes with being a general. She has said in her own defense that, on a visit to the prison, she tried to enter Cellblock 1A — where the abuse is alleged to have taken place — but that she was stopped by military intelligence officers who claimed that such visits interfered with interrogations. Obediently, she walked away.

In recent days, other generals have implied that Karpinski should have had the guts to do whatever was necessary to get access to that cellblock and put a stop to whatever she found was going on there. She may not have had authority over Army intelligence, but she did call the shots about how her own soldiers — the reservists — should behave.

Karpinski didn't do that. That's a leadership failure. And, for that, her career has most likely gone down in flames.

Now the bad news: Administration officials and the Pentagon have tried to paint this whole ugly affair as an isolated incident and an aberration.

That claim is undermined by an internal Army report that found the alleged abuse might have been encouraged, and possibly even ordered, by top military intelligence officers and civilian employees — yes, civilian employees — as a way of softening up prisoners for interrogation. It is also undermined by the e-mails sent home by one of the reservists charged, in which one soldier told his wife he was troubled by the treatment of prisoners but that this was how military intelligence wanted it done.

And here's more bad news: Since the scandal broke, there seems to be a not-so-subtle movement afoot by the leadership of the regular Army to shift all the blame to the lowly reservists and their commanders when, in reality, there are others out there — most likely, Army intelligence officers — who are trying to escape punishment.

This is an ugly affair, and so it's only natural for the Army to want to put the ugliness behind it. But that can't happen at the expense of the truth. For those of us who cover scandals, there's a familiar ring to all this. Whether the issue at hand is misconduct by police officers and prosecutors or allegations of sexual abuse by college athletes, the tendency is to find scapegoats.

In this case, it's the reservists. For whatever she did wrong, Karpinski may be right in bluntly insisting that Army commanders are trying to save their own skins by blaming the reservists and shifting attention from Army intelligence. And, she says, the reason for that has a lot to do with how the active-duty military views the reserves.

"We're disposable," she told The New York Times. "Why would they want the active-duty people to take the blame?"

They wouldn't. Reservists go home at some point. They go back to their lives, families and civilian careers. The folks in Army intelligence stay on the payroll and just move on to the next war, taking their interrogation tactics with them.

Now that should turn your stomach.

Ruben Navarrette's column appears regularly on editorial pages of The Times. His e-mail address is rnavarrette@dallasnews.com