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January 23, 2005
Atrocities in Plain Sight
By Andrew Sullivan
Correction Appended
THE ABU GHRAIB INVESTIGATIONS
The Official Report of the
Independent Panel and Pentagon on the Shocking Prisoner Abuse in
Iraq.
Edited by Steven Strasser.
Illustrated. 175 pp.
PublicAffairs. Paper, $14.
TORTURE AND TRUTH
America, Abu Ghraib,
and the War on Terror.
By Mark Danner.
Illustrated. 580 pp.
New York Review Books.
Paper, $19.95.
IN scandals, chronology can be everything. The facts you find out first,
the images that are initially imprinted on your consciousness, the
details that then follow: these make the difference between a culturechanging tipping point and a weatherable media flurry. With the
prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib, the photographs, which have become
iconic, created the context and the meaning of what took place. We
think we know the contours of that story: a few soldiers on the night
shift violated established military rules and subjected prisoners to
humiliating abuse and terror. Chaos in the line of command, an
overstretched military, a bewildering insurgency: all contributed to
incidents that were alien to the values of the United States and its
military. The scandal was an aberration. It was appalling.
Responsibility was taken. Reports were issued. Hearings continue.
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. The problem is not a co-ordinated cover-up. Nor
is it a lack of information. The official government and Red Cross
reports on prisoner torture and abuse, compiled in two separate
volumes, ”The Abu Ghraib Investigations,” by a former Newsweek
editor, Steven Strasser, and ”Torture and Terror,” by a New York
Review of Books contributor, Mark Danner, are almost numbingly
exhaustive in their cataloging of specific mistakes, incidents and
responsibilities. Danner’s document-dump runs to almost 600 pages
of print, the bulk of it in small type. The American Civil Liberties
Union has also successfully engineered the release of what may
eventually amount to hundreds of thousands of internal government
documents detailing the events.
That tells you something important at the start. Whatever happened
was exposed in a free society; the military itself began the first
inquiries. You can now read, in these pages, previously secret
memorandums from sources as high as the attorney general all the
way down to prisoner testimony to the International Committee of the
Red Cross. I confess to finding this transparency both comforting and
chilling, like the photographs that kick-started the public’s awareness
of the affair. Comforting because only a country that is still free would
allow such airing of blood-soaked laundry. 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.
The documents themselves tell the story. In this, Danner’s book is by
far the better of the two. He begins with passionate essays that
originally appeared in The New York Review of Books, but very soon
leaves the stage and lets the documents speak for themselves. His
book contains the two reports Strasser publishes, but many more as
well. If you read it in the order Danner provides, you can see exactly
how this horror came about — and why it’s still going on. As Danner
observes, this is a scandal with almost everything in plain sight.
The critical enabling decision was the president’s insistence that
prisoners in the war on terror be deemed ”unlawful combatants”
rather than prisoners of war. The arguments are theoretically sound
ones — members of Al Qaeda and the Taliban are not party to the
Geneva Convention and their own conduct violates many of its basic
demands. But even at the beginning, President
Bush clearly feared the consequences of so broad an exemption for
cruel and inhumane treatment. So he also insisted that although
prisoners were not legally eligible for humane treatment, they should
be granted it anyway. The message sent was: these prisoners are
beneath decent treatment, but we should still provide it. That’s a
strangely nuanced signal to be giving the military during wartime.
You can see the same strange ambivalence in Secretary of Defense
Donald Rumsfeld’s decision to approve expanded interrogation
techniques in December 2002 for Guant?mo inmates — and then to
revoke the order six weeks later. The documents show that the
president was clearly warned of the dangers of the policy he decided
upon — Colin Powell’s January 2002 memo is almost heart-breakingly
prescient and sane in this regard — but he pressed on anyway.
Rumsfeld’s own revocation of the order suggests his own moral
qualms about what he had unleashed.
But Bush clearly leaned toward toughness. Here’s the precise
formulation he used: ”As a matter of policy, the United States Armed
Forces shall continue to treat detainees humanely and, to the extent
appropriate and consistent with military necessity, in a manner
consistent with the principles of Geneva.” (My italics.)
Notice the qualifications. The president wants to stay not within the
letter of the law, but within its broad principles, and in the last resort,
”military necessity” can overrule all of it. According to his legal
counsel at the time, Alberto R. Gonzales, the president’s warmaking
powers gave him ultimate constitutional authority to ignore any
relevant laws in the conduct of the conflict. Sticking to the Geneva
Convention was the exclusive prerogative of one man, George W.
Bush; and he could, if he wished, make exceptions. As Helpant
Attorney General Jay S. Bybee argues in another memo: ”Any effort to
apply Section 2340A in a manner that interferes with the president’s
direction of such core war matters as the detention and interrogation
of enemy combatants thus would be unconstitutional.” (Section
2340A refers to the United States law that incorporates the
international Convention Against Torture.)
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.
In this context, Rumsfeld’s decision to take the gloves off in Guant?mo
for six weeks makes more sense. The use of dogs to intimidate
prisoners and the use of nudity for humiliation were now allowed.
Although abuse was specifically employed in only two cases before
Rumsfeld rescinded the order, practical precedents had been set; and
the broader mixed message sent from the White House clearly reached
commanders in the field. Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, in charge of the
Iraq counterinsurgency, also sent out several conflicting memos with
regard to the treatment of prisoners — memos that only added to the
confusion as to what was permitted and what wasn’t. When the
general in charge of Guant?mo was sent to Abu Ghraib to help
intelligence gathering, the ”migration” of techniques (the term used in
the Pentagon’s Schlesinger Report) from those reserved for extreme
cases in the leadership of Al Qaeda to thousands of Iraqi civilians,
most of whom, according to intelligence sources, were innocent of any
crime at all, was complete. Again, there is no evidence of anyone at a
high level directly mandating torture or abuse, except in two cases in
Gitmo. But there is growing evidence recently uncovered by the
A.C.L.U. — not provided in Danner’s compilation — that authorities in
the F.B.I. and elsewhere were aware of abuses and did little to prevent
or stop them. Then there were the vast loopholes placed in the White
House torture memos, the precedents at Guant?mo, the winks and
nods from Washington and the pressure of an Iraqi insurgency that
few knew how to restrain. It was a combustible mix.
What’s notable about the incidents of torture and abuse is first, their
common features, and second, their geographical reach. No one has
any reason to believe any longer that these incidents were restricted to
one prison near Baghdad. They were everywhere: from Guant?mo Bay
to Afghanistan, Baghdad, Basra, Ramadi and Tikrit and, for all we
know, in any number of hidden jails affecting ”ghost detainees” kept
from the purview of the Red Cross. They were committed by the
Marines, the Army, the Military Police, Navy Seals, reservists, Special
Forces and on and on. The use of hooding was ubiquitous; the same
goes for forced nudity, sexual humiliation and brutal beatings; there
are examples of rape and electric shocks. Many of the abuses seem
specifically tailored to humiliate Arabs and Muslims, where horror at
being exposed in public is a deep cultural artifact.
Whether random bad apples had picked up these techniques from
hearsay or whether these practices represented methods authorized by
commanders grappling with ambiguous directions from Washington
is hard to pin down from the official reports. But it is surely significant
that very few abuses occurred in what the Red Cross calls ”regular
internment facilities.” Almost all took place within prisons designed to
collect intelligence, including, of course, Saddam Hussein’s previous
torture palace at Abu Ghraib and even the former Baathist secret
police office in Basra. (Who authorized the use of these particular
places for a war of liberation is another mystery.) This tells us two
things: that the vast majority of soldiers in Iraq and elsewhere had
nothing to do with these incidents; and that the violence had a
purpose. The report of the International Committee of the Red Cross
says: ”Several military intelligence officers confirmed to the I.C.R.C.
that it was part of the military intelligence process to hold a person
deprived of his liberty naked in a completely dark and empty cell for a
prolonged period to use inhumane and degrading treatment,
including physical and psychological coercion.”
An e-mail message recovered by Danner from a captain in military
intelligence in August 2003 reveals the officer’s desire to distinguish
between genuine prisoners of war and ”unlawful combatants.” The
president, of course, had endorsed that distinction in theory, although
not in practice — even in Guant?mo, let alone Iraq. Somehow Bush’s
nuances never made it down the chain to this captain. In the message,
he asked for advice from other intelligence officers on which illegal
techniques work best: a ”wish list” for interrogators. Then he wrote:
”The gloves are coming off gentlemen regarding these detainees, Col.
Boltz has made it clear that we want these individuals broken.”
How do you break these people? According to the I.C.R.C., one
prisoner ”alleged that he had been hooded and cuffed with flexicuffs,
threatened to be tortured and killed, urinated on, kicked in the head,
lower back and groin, force-fed a baseball which was tied into the
mouth using a scarf and deprived of sleep for four consecutive days.
Interrogators would allegedly take turns ill-treating him. When he
said he would complain to the I.C.R.C. he was allegedly beaten more.
An I.C.R.C. medical examination revealed hematoma in the lower
back, blood in urine, sensory loss in the right hand due to tight
handcuffing with flexicuffs, and a broken rib.”
Even Bybee’s very narrow definition of torture would apply in this
case. Here’s another — not from Abu Ghraib:
A detainee ”had been hooded, handcuffed in the back, and made to lie
face down, on a hot surface during transportation. This had caused
severe skin burns that required three months’ hospitalization. . . . He
had to undergo several skin grafts, the amputation of his right index
finger, and suffered . . . extensive burns over the abdomen, anterior
aspects of the outer extremities, the palm of his right hand and the
sole of his left foot.”
And another, in a detainee’s own words: ”They threw pepper on my
face and the beating started. This went on for a half hour. And then he
started beating me with the chair until the chair was broken. After that
they started choking me. At that time I thought I was going to die, but
it’s a miracle I lived. And then they started beating me again. They
concentrated on beating me in my heart until they got tired from
beating me. They took a little break and then they started kicking me
very hard with their feet until I passed out.”
An incident uncovered by the A.C.L.U. and others was described in
The Washington Post on Dec. 22. A young soldier with no training in
interrogation techniques ”acknowledged forcing two men to their
knees, placing bullets in their mouths, ordering them to close their
eyes, and telling them they would be shot unless they answered
questions about a grenade incident. He then took the bullets, and a
colleague pretended to load them in the chamber of his M-16 rifle.”
These are not allegations made by antiwar journalists. They are
incidents reported within the confines of the United States
government. The Schlesinger panel has officially conceded, although
the president has never publicly acknowledged, that American soldiers
have tortured five inmates to death. Twenty-three other deaths that
occurred during American custody had not been fully investigated by
the time the panel issued its report in August. Some of the techniques
were simply brutal, like persistent vicious beatings to
unconsciousness. Others were more inventive. In April 2004,
according to internal Defense Department documents recently
procured by the A.C.L.U., three marines in Mahmudiya used an
electric transformer, forcing a detainee to ”dance” as the electricity
coursed through him. We also now know that in Guant?mo, burning
cigarettes were placed in the ears of detainees.
Here’s another case from the Army’s investigation into Abu Ghraib,
led by Lt. Gen. Anthony R. Jones and Maj. Gen. George R. Fay:
”On another occasion DETAINEE-07 was forced to lie down while
M.P.’s jumped onto his back and legs. He was beaten with a broom
and a chemical light was broken and poured over his body. . . . During
this abuse a police stick was used to sodomize DETAINEE-07 and two
female M.P.’s were hitting him, throwing a ball at his penis, and taking
photographs.”
Last December, documents obtained by the A.C.L.U. also cited an
F.B.I. agent at Guant?mo Bay who observed that ”on a couple of
occasions, I entered interview rooms to find a detainee chained hand
and foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food or water.
Most times they had urinated or defecated on themselves, and had
been left there for 18 to 24 hours or more.” In one case, he added, ”the
detainee was almost unconscious on the floor, with a pile of hair next
to him. He had apparently been literally pulling his own hair out
throughout the night.”
This kind of scene can also be found at Abu Ghraib: ”An 18 November
2003 photograph depicts a detainee dressed in a shirt or blanket lying
on the floor with a banana inserted into his anus. This as well as
several others show the same detainee covered in feces, with his hands
encased in sandbags, or tied in foam and between two stretchers.”
This, apparently, was a result of self-inflicted mania, although where
the mentally ill man procured a banana is not elaborated upon.
Also notable in Abu Ghraib was the despicable use of religion to
humiliate. One Muslim inmate was allegedly forced to eat pork, had
liquor forced down his throat and told to thank Jesus that he was
alive. He recounted in broken English:
”They stripped me naked, they asked me, ‘Do you pray to Allah?’ I
said, ‘Yes.’ They said ‘F / / / you’ and ‘F / / / him.’ ” Later, this inmate
recounts: ”Someone else asked me, ‘Do you believe in anything?’ I said
to him, ‘I believe in Allah.’ So he said, ‘But I believe in torture and I
will torture you.’ ”
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 Guant?mo Bay,
newly released documents show that some of the torturers felt they
were acting on the basis of memos sent from Washington.
Was the torture effective? The only evidence in the documents Danner
has compiled that it was even the slightest bit helpful comes from the
Schlesinger report. It says ”much of the information in the recently
released 9/11 Commission’s report, on the planning and execution of
the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, came from
interrogation of detainees at Guant?mo and elsewhere.” But the
context makes plain that this was intelligence procured without
torture. It also claims that good intelligence was received from the two
sanctioned cases of expanded interrogation techniques at Guant?mo.
But everything else points to the futility of the kind of brutal
techniques used in Iraq and elsewhere.
Worse, there’s plenty of evidence that this kind of treatment makes
gathering intelligence harder. In Abu Ghraib, according to the official
documents, up to 90 percent of the inmates were victims of random
and crude nighttime sweeps. If these thousands of Iraqis did not
sympathize with the insurgency before they came into American
custody, they had good reason to thereafter. Stories of torture, of
sexual humiliation, of religious mockery have become widespread in
Iraq, and have been amplified by the enemy. If the best intelligence
comes from persuading the indigenous population to give up
information on insurgents, then the atrocities perpetrated by a tiny
minority of American troops actually help the insurgency, rather than
curtail it.
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. His first instinct was to minimize the
issue; later, his main references to it were a couple of sentences
claiming that the abuses were the work of a handful of miscreants,
rather than a consequence of his own decisions. But the impact of
these events on domestic morale, on the morale of the vast majority of
honorable soldiers in a very tough place and on the reputation of the
United States in the Middle East is incalculable. The war on terror is
both military and political. The president’s great contribution has
been to recognize that a solution is impossible without political reform
in the Middle East. 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 Guant?
mo 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. A president who truly
recognized the moral and strategic calamity of this failure would have
fired everyone responsible. But the vice president’s response to
criticism of the defense secretary in the wake of Abu Ghraib was to
say, ”Get off his back.” In fact, those with real responsibility for the
disaster were rewarded. Rumsfeld was kept on for the second term,
while the man who warned against ignoring the Geneva Conventions,
Colin Powell, was seemingly nudged out. The man who wrote a legal
opinion maximizing the kind of brutal treatment that the United
States could legally defend, Jay S. Bybee, was subsequently rewarded
with a nomination to a federal Court of Appeals. General Sanchez and
Gen. John P. Abizaid remain in their posts. Alberto R. Gonzales, who
wrote memos that validated the decision to grant Geneva status to
inmates solely at the president’s discretion, is now nominated to the
highest law enforcement job in the country: attorney general. The man
who paved the way for the torture of prisoners is to be entrusted with
safeguarding the civil rights of Americans. It is astonishing he has
been nominated, and even more astonishing that he will almost
certainly be confirmed.
But in a democracy, the responsibility is also wider. Did those of us
who fought so passionately for a ruthless war against terrorists give an
unwitting green light to these abuses? Were we na? in believing that
characterizing complex conflicts from Afghanistan to Iraq as a single
simple war against ”evil” might not filter down and lead to decisions
that could dehumanize the enemy and lead to abuse? Did our
conviction of our own rightness in this struggle make it hard for us to
acknowledge when that good cause had become endangered? I fear
the answer to each of these questions is yes.
American political polarization also contributed. Most of those who
made the most fuss about these incidents — like Mark Danner or
Seymour Hersh — were dedicated opponents of the war in the first
place, and were eager to use this scandal to promote their agendas.
Advocates of the war, especially those allied with the administration,
kept relatively quiet, or attempted to belittle what had gone on, or
made facile arguments that such things always occur in wartime. But
it seems to me that those of us who are most committed to the Iraq
intervention should be the most vociferous in highlighting these
excrescences. Getting rid of this cancer within the system is essential
to winning this war.
I’m not saying that those who unwittingly made this torture possible
are as guilty as those who inflicted it. I am saying that when the results
are this horrifying, it’s worth a thorough reassessment of rhetoric and
war methods. Perhaps the saddest evidence of our communal denial in
this respect was the election campaign. The fact that American
soldiers were guilty of torturing inmates to death barely came up. It
went unmentioned in every one of the three presidential debates. 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.
Photos: A naked prisoner appears to cower before an unmuzzled dog
in a photograph taken at Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad in late
2003 and leaked to The Washington Post a few months later.
(Photograph by Agence France-Presse, via Getty Images); A man
detained at Abu Ghraib appears chained to a bed with a woman’s
underpants on his head. (Photograph courtesy of The Washington
Post); A hooded detainee at Abu Ghraib, apparently chained to a door
and balancing on two boxes. (Photograph from Agence FrancePresse/The Washington Post)
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