“Ripper Takes the Fifth”

The title duly stolen from this by digby refers,of course, to an interesting break in the abuse trial of two dog handlers associated with good old Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. It seems that the former commanding officer responsible for the area including Abu Ghraib, and earlier, of the good old Guantanamo Bay detention and interrogation operation, General Geoffrey “Jack D. Ripper” Miller took the fifth (actually invoking article 31 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice) to decline to incriminate himself; this took place conveniently after Colonel Thomas Pappas of former-commander-of-Abu-Ghraib fame accepted a plea deal with military prosecutors.
This is all fascinating. As readers of my recent posts (particularly this one) are aware, there’s been some abuse alleged about Gitmo… like General Ripper Miller wantin’ interrogators to get tougher, so we could get more “results”, assuming one considers coerced confessions and/or incriminations to be “results” which the good general clearly did; he took this brand of action with him, of course, to Abu Ghraib…
Curioser and curioser. We’ll see, of course, if anyone above the rank of Sergeant Major has to answer for any abuse whatsoever carried out by the military in the War on TerrorTM, whether in Iraq, Guantanamo Bay or anywhere else. But why should the military be different from the rest of our government in that regard?