How did the U.S. get into the detainee abuse problem?

The detainee abuse and torture problem came out of Vice President Cheney's office. They believe that "the president of the United States is all-powerful" and the Geneva Conventions irrelevant." This is what former Powell chief of staff Lawrence Wilkerson says. He also says that President Bush was "too aloof, too distant from the details of postwar planning. Underlings exploited Bush's detachment and made poor decisions>"

This fits with the idea that Bush enjoys electoral politics and getting elected, but has no interest in policy or actual governance.

The following is from Steve Clemons:

Wilkerson blamed Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and likeminded aides. He said Cheney must have sincerely believed that Iraq could be a spawning ground for new terror assaults, because "otherwise I have to declare him a moron, an idiot or a nefarious bastard."

On the question of detainees picked up in Afghanistan and other fronts in the war on terror, Wilkerson said Bush heard two sides of an impassioned argument within his administration. Abuse of prisoners, and even the deaths of some who had been interrogated in Afghanistan and elsewhere, have bruised the U.S. image abroad and undermined support for the Iraq war.

Cheney's office, Rumsfeld aides and others argued "that the president of the United States is all-powerful, that as commander in chief the president of the United States can do anything he damn well pleases," Wilkerson said.

On the other side were Powell, others at the State Department and top military brass, and occasionally Condoleezza Rice, who was then national security adviser, Wilkerson said.

Powell raised frequent and loud objections, his former aide said, once yelling into a telephone at Rumsfeld: "Donald, don't you understand what you are doing to our image?"

Wilkerson said Bush tried to work out a compromise in 2001 and 2002 that recognized that the war on terrorism was different from past wars and required greater flexibility in handling prisoners who don't belong to an enemy state or follow the rules themselves.

Bush's stated policy, which was heatedly criticized by civil liberties and legal groups at the time, was defensible, Wilkerson said. But it was undermined almost immediately in practice, he said.

In the field, the United States followed the policies of hardliners who wanted essentially unchecked ability to detain and harshly interrogate prisoners at Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere, Wilkerson said.

Essentially, Bush with his attitude of disinterest in policy and his resultant inability to control his subordinates stated his policy which was promptly ignored by Cheney's hardliners.

Delegation doesn't mean giving orders and then ignoring what the subordinates actually do. It means giving assignments and checking on the results and how they were achieved. That is MBA 101. Apparently G. W. Bush missed that class.