January 13, 2005
YOU COULD TELEVISE IT AND MOST STILL WOULDN'T MIND:
Atrocities in Plain Sight (ANDREW SULLIVAN, NY Times Book Review)
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 culture-changing 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 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.
It's always a good idea before you accuse George W. Bush of nuance to pause and see if you're not mistaken. In this instance it seems a fairly blunt distinction was drawn between the proposed treatment of those enemies of the United States who, at least in theory, follow the laws of war themselves and those who don't consider themselves so bound. Meanwhile, Abu Ghraib, of course, says nothing about freedom in America. Rather it speaks to what freedoms need be extended to those who oppose ours. Posted by Orrin Judd at January 13, 2005 11:07 AM
I really dislike disparaging motives in an argument. Motives are unprovable and don't resolve anything. But Sullivan's commentary on this issue has been so obtuse, so willfully blind to grim reality, that it can only be the result of his need to get to a predetermined result. He conflates torture as part of an attempt to develop intelligence with prisoner abuse; he relies on the statements of released terrorists and prisoners as if they were perfectly reliable; and he resolutely ignores any evidence that doesn't fit with his thesis. It would be, for example, legal malpractice, contrary to well-settled US policy and stupid to the point of impeachment to hold that terrorists are, as a matter of law, entitled to the protections of the Geneva Convention.
I'm agnostic as to what his motivation is: it is either his general dislike of the administration for its resistence to gay marriage, or his refusal to see that the war he supported would necessarily result in acts he finds repellant and an allied wish to blame the administration for bollixing up his pleasant little war.
As for the substantive question itself, the idiots at AG deserve whatever punishment they get. On the other hand, while I don't think we should do things that we consider torture, I have no problem with our doing things that don't offend our moral code even if the terrorists or the Red Cross or the EU or the anti-war left consider them torture. I have, for example, no problem at all with our forcing recalcitrant prisoners to eat pork, denounce Mohammed or with wrapping them in the Israeli flag.
Posted by: David Cohen at January 13, 2005 11:23 AMOf the pictures I have seen of Abu Ghraib and the sexual pranks and posturing done by the juvenile guards, my conclusion would be that America does have "moral" issues and that someone living a perverted lifestyle like Andrew Sullivan is in fact the enabler.
Posted by: h-man at January 13, 2005 11:40 AMSullivan is probably just experiencing emotions most don't understand as he refers to Abu Ghraib. Could be that stack of naked men that gets him sweaty.
I agree with David and H both.
We'll never have the opinions of other participants in this war regarding handling of prisoners. They being the men and women jumping out of the WTC,those that were burned to death, Daniel Perle, Nick Berg, and a host of others who rode the planes that day. Would they think what we've done to the prisoners is indeed torture? Not hardly.
This is war we are in and whatever it takes to prevent another attack is the direction we must go.
Posted by: at January 13, 2005 12:18 PMSullivan is probably just experiencing emotions most don't understand as he refers to Abu Ghraib. Could be that stack of naked men that gets him sweaty.
I agree with David and H both.
We'll never have the opinions of other participants in this war regarding handling of prisoners. They being the men and women jumping out of the WTC,those that were burned to death, Daniel Perle, Nick Berg, and a host of others who rode the planes that day. Would they think what we've done to the prisoners is indeed torture? Not hardly.
This is war we are in and whatever it takes to prevent another attack is the direction we must go.
Posted by: Tom Wall at January 13, 2005 12:19 PMSullivan is so fixated on the entire world admiring whatever decision he makes about where to put his phallus that all other issues pale by comparison. The 'prisoners' at Abu Gharib and Guantanamo tried to kill Americans. That fact alone to my mind justifies anything we do to them, including boiling them in oil live on the evening news broadcast.
Posted by: Bart at January 13, 2005 01:53 PMOn 9/12/2001, Andrew would have agreed with Bart (well, pretty much). By 01/01/2003, he had changed.
I suspect he wanted to spend 2005-2009 writing about the failures of a Democratic President.
Posted by: jim hamlen at January 13, 2005 02:50 PMSince they are beyond any doubt unlawful combatants but cannot be held nor interrogated, it's better to just shoot them on the battlefield. Nobody will miss them and most of them fight to the death anyway.
As to Sullivan, I suspect it are the reports about sodomization that made him change from a conservative into an ardent Kerry supporter. Only Sully is entitled to commit such acts, I guess.
Posted by: Peter at January 13, 2005 04:05 PMActually, I think it's as much a case of Andrew backing himself into an intellectual corner before the election, due to his anger with Bush originating from his DOMA position, and now post-election his being forced to carry through his Abu Ghraib allegations from this past spring and summer to their not-quite-coherent conclusion in order to be politically consistant in his own mind. He might do well to remember the adiage "When you're in a hole, stop digging" and find a different topic two write on that will produce less tortured logic.
Posted by: John at January 13, 2005 08:25 PM