Today's front page of the NYT Book Review features a
review by Andrew Sullivan on
The Abu Ghraib Investigations edited by Steven Strasser and
Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror by Mark Danner.
I haven't read either book. To be honest, I could barely get through the review. I am not including excerpts describing the torture and abuse to which detainees were subjected. At the end, Sullivan comments on this aversion to horror when he wonders why Kerry never brought the issue up in the campaign:
John F. Kerry, the ''heroic'' protester of Vietnam, ducked the issue out of what? Fear? Ignorance? Or a belief that the American public ultimately did not care, that the consequences of seeming to criticize the conduct of troops would be more of an electoral liability than holding a president accountable for enabling the torture of innocents? I fear it was the last of these. Worse, I fear he may have been right.
But Sullivan also does not flinch from drawing the lines of responsibility right through the Secretary of Defense and on up to the Oval Office.
All emphases mine.
Sullivan begins with
But the photographs lied. They told us a shard of the truth. In retrospect, they deflected us away from what was really going on, and what is still going on.
Still. This story has not ended. The Gonzales hearings should be an opportunity to make sure it is still being told.
Sullivan does an overview of the torture memo wherein Gonzales opined that it was Bush's prerogative to follow the Geneva Convention. It is what Sullivan describes as "strangely nuanced" signals and ambivalence from Bush and Rumsfeld which created the context in which these atrocities could take place.
The president's underlings got the mixed message. Bybee analyzed the relevant statutes against torture to see exactly how far the military could go in mistreating prisoners without blatant illegality. His answer was surprisingly expansive. He argued that all the applicable statutes and treaty obligations can be read in such a way as to define torture very narrowly. Bybee asserted that the president was within his legal rights to permit his military surrogates to inflict ''cruel, inhuman or degrading'' treatment on prisoners without violating strictures against torture. For an act of abuse to be considered torture, the abuser must be inflicting pain ''of such a high level of intensity that the pain is difficult for the subject to endure.'' If the abuser is doing this to get information and not merely for sadistic enjoyment, then ''even if the defendant knows that severe pain will result from his actions,'' he's not guilty of torture. Threatening to kill a prisoner is not torture; ''the threat must indicate that death is 'imminent.' '' Beating prisoners is not torture either. Bybee argues that a case of kicking an inmate in the stomach with military boots while the prisoner is in a kneeling position does not by itself rise to the level of torture.
Bybee even suggests that full-fledged torture of inmates might be legal because it could be construed as ''self-defense,'' on the grounds that ''the threat of an impending terrorist attack threatens the lives of hundreds if not thousands of American citizens.'' By that reasoning, torture could be justified almost anywhere on the battlefield of the war on terror. Only the president's discretion forbade it. These guidelines were formally repudiated by the administration the week before Gonzales's appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee for confirmation as attorney general.
Self-defense. Instead, Sullivan notes that
And yet the prevalence of brutality and inhumanity among American interrogators has robbed the United States of the high ground it desperately needs to maintain in order to win. What better weapon for Al Qaeda than the news that an inmate at Guantánamo was wrapped in the Israeli flag or that prisoners at Abu Ghraib were raped? There is no escaping the fact that, whether he intended to or not, this president handed Al Qaeda that weapon. Sometimes a brazen declaration of toughness is actually a form of weakness. In a propaganda war for the hearts and minds of Muslims everywhere, it's simply self-defeating.
And the damage done was intensified by President Bush's refusal to discipline those who helped make this happen.
No. Instead they were rewarded. Rumsfeld got a second term. Bybee has been nominated to a federal Court of Appeals. Gonzales may be out next Attorney General.
According to Sullivan, American soldiers knew precisely what they were doing.
Whether we decide to call this kind of treatment ''abuse'' or some other euphemism, there is no doubt what it was in the minds of the American soldiers who perpetrated it. They believed in torture. And many believed it was sanctioned from above. According to The Washington Post, one sergeant who witnessed the torture thought Military Intelligence approved of all of it: ''The M.I. staffs, to my understanding, have been giving Graner'' - one of the chief torturers at Abu Ghraib - ''compliments on the way he has been handling the M.I. holds [prisoners held by military intelligence]. Example being statements like 'Good job, they're breaking down real fast'; 'They answer every question'; 'They're giving out good information, finally'; and 'Keep up the good work' - stuff like that.'' At Guantánamo Bay, newly released documents show that some of the torturers felt they were acting on the basis of memos sent from Washington.
And the buck stops with Bush.
Who was responsible? There are various levels of accountability. But it seems unmistakable from these documents that decisions made by the president himself and the secretary of defense contributed to confusion, vagueness and disarray, which, in turn, led directly to abuse and torture. The president bears sole responsibility for ignoring Colin Powell's noble warnings. The esoteric differences between legal ''abuse'' and illegal ''torture'' and the distinction between ''prisoners of war'' and ''unlawful combatants'' were and are so vague as to make the abuse of innocents almost inevitable. Justice Sandra Day O'Connor wrote for the majority of the Supreme Court in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld that ''the government has never provided any court with the full criteria that it uses in classifying individuals'' as enemy combatants. It is one thing to make a distinction in theory between Geneva-protected combatants and unprotected Qaeda operatives. But in the chaos of a situation like Iraq, how can you practically know the difference? When one group is designated as unworthy of humane treatment, and that group is impossible to distinguish from others, it is unsurprising that exceptions quickly become rules. The best you can say is that in an administration with a reputation for clear lines of command and clear rules of engagement, the vagueness and incompetence are the most striking features.
Worse, the president has never acknowledged the scope or the real gravity of what has taken place.
Sullivan asserts that this abomination is both "comforting" and "chilling." Comforting because the "airing of blood-soaked laundry" is evidence that we are free. And chilling because
the crimes committed strike so deeply at the core of what a free country is supposed to mean. The scandal of Abu Ghraib is therefore a sign of both freedom's endurance in America and also, in certain dark corners, its demise.
Until there is accountability, I am not as sure that we are free.