Consider the scandal of Abu Ghraib—which, as is becoming apparent, is the scandal of an entire gulag—from another angle: as a toxic, but logical, policy consequence of the assumptions with which the Pentagon took us to war.
Posted from Reading A1, the NY Times front page project
Why was Geoffrey Miller, the Gitmo commandant, sent to Iraq last August to consult on the prison system? The likeliest possibility, to my mind, is that a decision was taken at a high level to start grinding down hard on "security detainees" in the CPA gulag: that there was high-level impatience with the quantity of intelligence product coming from Abu Ghraib (another possibility would be a decision to re-orient the detention regime toward intelligence production) and that Miller was the the go-to guy, the Pentagon's star screw-turning technocrat. Certainly a number of factors were in play that might have produced impatience. Months after the end of "major combat," our troops and our supply lines continued to be vulnerable to attack. The country was awash in weapons, up to and including RPGs, anti-tank weapons and shoulder-fired SAMs. Worse might conceivably have been out there, given the virtually entire lack of security for weapons sites (even for sites with nuclear material) in the weeks following the collapse of the Hussein regime. Added to which, the clock was ticking: we were going to have to cede formal control of the country within a year, and with it at least a significant amount of our ability to operate Abu Ghraib and the rest of the gulag unimpeded.
Notice that every item in that description of the security situation results directly from the decision to go into Iraq quick and cheap and trust to luck for the aftermath. But let's flesh it out with one thing more, this one related to the TerraWar and the Administration's continued, delusory insistence on the connection between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. I've tended to figure, when confronted with the latest Pentagon hype about "foreign fighters" or "Baathist dead-enders," that I'm looking at nothing more than PR product—strictly for the rubes. But what if they disseminate that stuff because they believe it, and always have? How much more cause for urgency is there if you're working under the assumption that it's only a matter of time before Baathists (with access to some of Saddam's stolen billions) and Al Qaeda operatives hook up and really set the shitstorm to brewing? And what are your investigative tactics going to be, knowing that in a tribal society you have virtually no opportunity (and no time) to work your way into the terror or proto-terror networks you're sure must be forming?
These, then, are the conditions under which Gen. Geoffrey Miller makes his appearance. Representing, perhaps, yet another quick-and-cheap Pentagon solution: systematic (and bureaucratically "correct") brutality as the royal road to security. Probably wasn't even a tough sell.