Hence my comment about educational problems in the service.

There are good reasons to minimise thinking for oneself in a combat situation. Because of this, combat situations are often taken as a mitigating circumstance when adjudicating illegal actions of this type. That said, the overall tendency to train people to minimise thinking for themselves because of the need to act on orders during combat can have some very undesirable knock-on effects, as Abu Ghraib was not a combat situation.

That said, the ONLY reason why one can condemn the chain of command in the Abu Ghraib situation is because the officers (who are generally supposed to be educated in these things; that's why they're officers) didn't act until they realised they were about to be exposed to the world at large.

This is the only reason, but it's absolutely sufficient to condemn everyone all the way to the top. The statements coming out of the civilian leadership, the attempts to legalise torture by Gonzalez, the various orders and statements posted in the workplace all condemn the chain of command all the way up to the top general in the theatre as well as his civilian overseers are just gravy to add to the real crime.

To everyone that knows about how these things are supposed to work in Western democracies and militaries, the Abu Ghraib scandal (along with Gitmo, and now with NSA surveillance) has given the US a massive black eye in the eyes of its Western allies, as well as with the rest of the world. It will take years to undo the damage, and might take generations if the following leadership after 2008 doesn't take steps to bring it all out into the open and start putting the current administration's feet to the fire after they leave office.

The whole situation just sucks.