Free Case Study On Parallel Bloody Hands

Leaders are essentially charged with the responsibility of overseeing the operations of affairs at certain designations. This means that whatever takes place within the field of supervision assigned to a certain leader reflects directly on the respective leader. This point is especially significant for students and practitioners alike within public service where implications of people’s actions have far-reaching effects. A case in point is that of legislators and policymakers within government.
These people are charged with establishing frameworks within which the socio-economic status of citizens can be enhanced. To achieve this requires the collaborative efforts of a large number of people to whom duties and responsibilities are assigned. The leader is then responsibility for the overall performance of such extensive teams of individuals. Actions attributed to any member of the team must then be a reflection of the leader’s position as well. This is the case with former Secretaries of Defense Robert McNamara and Donald Rumsfeld.
In the case of Secretary McNamara, he was in charge of the policies that guided the involvement of the United States in the Vietnam War. He was the Secretary of Defense under Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. He is on record as having been greatly skeptical of some of the facts used as justifications for the war as the well as the general policy guiding the war. Foremost, he did not believe that the strategies proposed by his administration to deploy more troops to Vietnam as well as the intensification of attacks against the attacks on North Vietnam. Nevertheless, he went ahead to implement these policies and strategies irrespective of his skepticism and misgivings. As a result, several lives were lost and a lot of property destroyed, eventualities for which he stands directly responsible.
The same case applies to Secretary Rumsfeld. The most controversial aspect of his tenure was the blatant display of impunity through the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. Donald Rumsfeld was the Secretary of Defense under President George W. Bush. In 2004, during the extensive and equally infamous Iraq war, there were reports of severe human rights violations against detainees and prisoners of war at the Iraqi Abu Ghraib prison. These reports included allegations of physical torture, psychological torment, sexual abuse, as well as extrajudicial killings. This was done as a way of terrorizing the prisoners as well as a means of extracting information from them. Other subtler forms of torture were also widely reported, thus creating a general impression that indeed torture was part of the administration’s strategies in Iraq.
Such vile acts reflected negatively on the Bush administration, and more so, on Secretary Rumsfeld who was directly responsible for implementing the administration’s Iraq policies and strategies. It was the soldiers on the ground and within the perimeter of the prison that perpetrated these inhumane acts. The Secretary was neither expressly nor implicitly liable for these acts, despite several allegations to the contrary. This means that the law could not hold him accountable for the human rights violations, even though the responsible soldiers claimed that they were only following orders. Nevertheless, since the Secretary was in charge of policy execution during the war, it was his responsibility to ensure that ground operations were in line with the administration’s policies. As such, the doctrine of accountability in public administration implies that he was directly responsible for those acts.