The Legacy of Abu Ghraib: Was it Really Torture?
The U.S. formally handed over control of Abu Ghraib to Iraqi authorities this week. Iraqi officials have announced that Abu Ghraib will no longer be used as a prison, and that is probably a good thing. The sad thing is that we waited for the Iraqis to take this symbolic step instead of doing it ourselves – because Abu Ghraib is now a legacy that will taint American foreign policy initiatives for many years to come. Perhaps in ways that the average American has yet to realize.
Average Americans think that what happened at Abu Ghraib was not real torture – not as bad as the kind of torture our soldiers endured during the Vietnam War. Given the response of the right-wing punditry to this scandal, it is not surprising Abu Ghraib would be viewed through this prism. No American wants to accept that their soldiers-the ones they pay to fight for them-could truly be war criminals. Certainly our soldiers could not be as wicked as the ruthless enemies we’re fighting-enemies who behead people and sends out videos of their ghastly deeds.
After all, the vision of Americans that emerged from Abu Ghraib is not the face that we see in the mirror; the crass smile on Private Lynndie England’s face as she gives the thumbs up sign next to a naked prisoner is not the face of America as we know it. Unfortunately, it is now the face of America that the Middle East sees.
The torture, and even more, our response to it, injured our reputation badly, and it was a self-inflicted wound. The cut went even deeper, because the abuse happened at the very prison where Saddam Hussein systematically abused, tortured, and executed his political enemies. There are mass graves on the site of the prison, so the symbolism couldn’t have been worse. Supposedly, we are in Iraq as liberators-we said we were there to depose a brutal dictator. Iraqis inevitably questioned the veracity of our claims when they saw that the same kinds of things were happening in that same prison as when the dictator was in power.
Abu Ghraib represents a stretch of moral high ground that we will never be able to get back, and fuels those fighting against us in Iraq and around the globe. It is irrefutable that what happened at Abu Ghraib has cost us in the blood of American soldiers. Because of this, and because it is a violation of our most basic values, it must be understood and prevented from ever happening again. And that means acknowledging what really happened there.
Was it Really That Bad?
Rush Limbaugh said that what happened was no worse than a fraternity prank-that soldiers were just having a little fun. His message was that these prisoners had it coming to them. (Never mind that the famously hooded prisoner, hooked up to the electric wires, was actually under arrest for carjacking, not terrorism. Never mind that these same conservatives pundits want to put film-makers in jail for showing nudity on the public airwaves, but forcing naked Iraqis to perform sexual acts on film is just some good old American fun.)
In the end, perhaps it was the nudity that created the public confusion over what really happened at Abu Ghraib; perhaps the prurience of the images that we saw overwhelmed the brutal accounts of what we did not see. People remember Lynndie England and piles of naked Iraqis, but forget about the venomous snakes that were allowed to attack and kill some prisoners. They forget the stoning and shooting of prisoners for minor offenses. They forget the Army’s own official investigation which revealed our soldiers broke limbs and battered them with batons so they could not heal, poured acid upon prisoners, and set attack dogs on them. They forget that our soldiers raped and sodomized. And they forget that more than a hundred of those prisoners may have been children.
These horrible accounts are not liberal stories made up to make the military look bad. The Army’s own investigator, Major General Antonio Taguba, concluded that U.S. soldiers had committed “egregious acts and grave breaches of international law” at Abu Ghraib. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld himself admitted that the photos and videos that were not released to the public were much worse than what we had seen. And after viewing this classified footage from Abu Ghraib, a much shaken Republican Senator Lindsey Graham said, “The American public needs to understand we’re talking about rape and murder here.”
Sounds like the Viet Cong to me.
And lest any American be laboring under the misconception that this torture took place as part of some dire, 24-style, intelligence gathering crisis, the U.S. Army asserts that “the inmates abused and sexually humiliated last year at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq were of little or no intelligence value to the United States.”
How We Made It Worse
The United States does not want to admit that our soldiers committed torture, even though their actions fall clearly within the definition of that term according to the Geneva Convention. Certainly, if these actions had been taken upon American soldiers, we would be singing a different tune, and our inability to admit what is plain as day to the rest of the world is hurting our efforts to defeat terrorism.
Our denial only seeks to justify and cement an ugly picture of our fundamental nature as a nation. Add to this the fact that President Bush fought Senator McCain’s anti-torture bill. Then, when he was finally forced to sign it, he included a signing statement indicating that he had no intention of following it. Given these facts, one must inescapably conclude that the Administration was not grieved by the fact that their soldiers tortured people-just that they got caught.
And this equivocation on torture has made a mockery of the idea that Abu Ghraib was the work of a few bad apples; it makes us all guilty. This is the Information Age. The world is watching us, now more than ever before. And the contrast between our treatment of Iraqi prisoners and those we fought in Kosovo begs the question of whether or not we see Arabs or Muslims as sub-human. That is one of the dark and dangerous legacies of Abu Ghraib.
And since there are an estimated 1.6 billion Muslims in this world, and only an estimated 270 million Americans, perhaps we ought to take that image problem more seriously.
Certainly, handing over the prison to the Iraqi government is a start, but there’s more work to do.
