Josh Marshall more on Iraqi prisoner abuse:

As I think is already becoming clear, the responsibility for all of this goes right to the very top -- to the President, the Secretary of Defense, the Vice President and many others. The point isn't that the president ordered or knew specifically that soldiers in Iraq were setting attack dogs on to naked prisoners or all the other outrages we're about to hear of. But going back almost three years these men made very conscious and specific decisions to disregard or opt out of the various international conventions, rules and traditions governing the treatment of prisoners of war and enemy combatants that are intended to prevent such things from happening.

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In the case of the president, it's hard to know what to think. As Jake Weisberg explains here, the president of the United States is just so cocksure, incurious and lazy that I think it's half possible he's never gotten past the gleaming phrases his advisors have given him to make sense of what's happening on his watch. Nor, I think, can we discount the possibility that the president's advisors and the president himself knew enough of what was probably happening -- how their orders were being executed in practice -- not to want to know the details.