During the recent Congressional testimonies by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and others, the air ran thick with military jargon such as “command influence” and “chain of command”, but nowhere was the word “command responsibility” uttered. In 1945, following Japan's surrender to the Allied Powers, General Tomoyuki Yamashita, commander of Japanese military forces in the Philippines, was tried for war crimes by a U.S. military tribunal, found guilty, and hanged. His crime: failure to uphold “command responsibility” over all the Japanese troops operating in the Philippines.