Abu Ghraib, Second Thoughts About War, and Nick Berg

Matt Welch | January 13, 2005

Over at The New York Times, Andrew Sullivan disgorges his long-simmering disgust at American torture. Self-doubting excerpt:

Did those of us who fought so passionately for a ruthless war against terrorists give an unwitting green light to these abuses? Were we naive 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. [...]

[W]hen the results are this horrifying, it's worth a thorough reassessment of rhetoric and war methods.

One thing I found very interesting while researching the conservative reaction to Abu Ghraib, was how it triggered a real crisis of confidence, as expressed in columns by David Brooks and George Will, which in turn sparked a solid week or two of cons-having-second-thoughts-about-the-War articles. What finally brought this festival of second-guessing to halt? I'm sure William Kristol and Mort Kondracke would like to believe it was their don't-go-wobbly columns, but in fact the biggest single factor was the videotaped decapitation of Nick Berg. Here's Brooks on PBS, just days after describing the Iraq War as "clearly an intellectual failure":

[T]he killing of Nick Berg apparently by Zarqawi personally rallied a lot of people. I mean, it reminded people of what this thing is all about [...] I think it firmed up resolve for a lot of people that said, yes, we're humiliated, yes, a lot of things have been -- but the enemy is still out there and it is really, really bad and we need to buckle down.

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Warren|1.13.05 @ 3:32PM|#

Yep, you know we're being sucked down into the bog of the Mid East when you hear "What we did is OK because what they did was worse".

|1.13.05 @ 3:37PM|#

I thought only the left was afflicted by that moral relativism stuff.

|1.13.05 @ 3:57PM|#

So in other words, that bastard Zaraqwari's efforts to goad us into irrationally lashing out against Muslims worked.

|1.13.05 @ 4:01PM|#

Terrorism is a tactic you use to make a much stronger opponent behave irrationally and overreact and do more damage to itself than you could ever do. Damage in a PR sense, and military, financial, and so on

Osama, Zarqawi - these guys have played us like a violin.

gaius marius|1.13.05 @ 4:05PM|#

in other words, we are fucked up -- but have been distracted from that recognition because other people are also fucked up, and it is easier and less painful to observe the latter than the former.

|1.13.05 @ 4:09PM|#

Terrorism is a tactic you use to make a much stronger opponent behave irrationally and overreact and do more damage to itself than you could ever do.

Actually, I thought the US did a fine job acting irrationally even without Terrorism. See the war on drugs.

|1.13.05 @ 4:29PM|#

America, we're the best at EVERYTHING!

|1.13.05 @ 4:41PM|#

The war on drugs is pretty rational if you're a politician, in law enforcement, or some way financially connected to the Prison Industrial Complex.

But yeah, point taken. Sometimes I think America is a good example of emergent stupidity. A lot of smart people can, in a large enough group, make really stupid decisions. Sort of like corporations but on a larger scale.

|1.13.05 @ 5:03PM|#

I'm increasingly convinced, in large part due to the continuing non-scandal of the sexual abuse committed by UN peace keeprs all over Africa, that the responsibility for the torture at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere is not the War on Terrorism, or Bush, Rummy et al, or American hubris. It's war. It's the fact that twenty year old men are told to kill people, and hurt people, but only under the exact right circumstances. If a Canadian soldier on a peace-keeping mission in Somalia can torture a civilian (as the Canadian government admitted happened) then it can happen anywhere. Does that mean we should avoid war altogether? Of course not. When considering whether to go to war or not, one should assume that civillians will die, people will be tortured, and raped, buildings will be looted, prostitution (including of children) will happen, and then decide if its worth it.

|1.13.05 @ 5:16PM|#

It was stupid to doubt the basis for the war because of Abu Ghraib to begin with. There's no conflict between believing that the war is just and the abuse of the prisoners is unjust.

gaius marius|1.13.05 @ 5:30PM|#

It's war.

nice abstraction to resolve your heroes from culpability. very moral.

of COURSE war brings out the worst in men, mr white -- isn't that obvious? the question is whether we should be outraged by it -- and i answer to that emphatically YES! punish these people vigorously! purge them!!

even in winning a war, the victor can easily be pulled to pieces by the death of aspiration. all of this immoral nonsense -- torture ok, death squads ok, it's not us it's war -- is tantamount to the end of aspiring to be more than animals.

if you are not shocked, appalled and shaking with anger that these men have mocked and spat upon all that we hold to be good in ourselves, you are nothing more than part and parcel to the decline of this civilization.

thoreau said, "We aspire to be something more than stupid and timid chattels, pretending to read history and our Bibles, but desecrating every house and every day we breathe in."

who we are and what we will become is in a very profound way best described by what we aspire to be. if we aspire to no better than this -- when we refuse to aspire to anything at all -- we are doomed to chaos and barbarity.

|1.13.05 @ 5:49PM|#

It's not just that they committed torture, it's that the torture was either directly or indirectly the result of decisions made at the very highest levels of government. I don't think the actions of those U.N. peacekeepers can be traced to a pro-sexual-abuse policy by the U.N.

|1.13.05 @ 6:20PM|#

"I'm increasingly convinced, in large part due to the continuing non-scandal of the sexual abuse committed by UN peace keeprs all over Africa, that the responsibility for the torture at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere is not the War on Terrorism, or Bush, Rummy et al, or American hubris. It's war."

I suspect that you may have been convinced too easily.

The Schlesinger Report, which Donald Rumsfeld commissioned, blames the abuse at Abu Gharib on the confusion created by Rumsfeld's decision to abandon the Geneva Conventions under the advice of the Gonzales Torture Memo.

http://www.npr.org/documents/2004/abuse/schlesinger_report.pdf

|1.13.05 @ 6:30PM|#

"I'm increasingly convinced, in large part due to the continuing non-scandal of the sexual abuse committed by UN peace keeprs all over Africa, that the responsibility for the torture at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere is not the War on Terrorism, or Bush, Rummy et al, or American hubris. It's war."

I re-read your comment, and I think I see what you mean now.

If UN Peace Keepers sexually abused children in Africa, then it logically follows that the Bush Administration, etc. couldn't possibly be responsible for the torture at Abu Gharib.

...Wait a second! That doesn't follow! That doesn't follow at all.

|1.13.05 @ 9:16PM|#

Either those torturers in Abu Ghraib must be guilty, or the Uruguayan/Nepalese/ etc. peace keepers in Africa must be guilty, right? No. Anyone who murders, rapes, tortures, steals from..... another is guilty. This is obvious. But what causes people to do such things? That's a question worth asking. I put the blame, if that's the right word, on the necessity, if you're going to have an army, on giving guns to 20 year old men. Mark Borok notes that the UN doesn't have a pro-sexual abuse policy, and yet they committed these crimes anyways. I'm not convinced that the torturers at abu ghraib were given government approval, but assume they were. Why were things not worse then?

|1.13.05 @ 9:25PM|#

Abu Ghraib, in the minds of a large part of the worlds population, isn't just about what happened, its about America. America=bad=torture=Saddam Hussein or a close second. Can't a body try to explain why this is a ridiculous conceit, without being accused of condoing the very real and unjustfiable torture that Americans committed there?

|1.13.05 @ 9:26PM|#

Abu Ghraib, in the minds of a large part of the worlds population, isn't just about what happened, its about America. America=bad=torture=Saddam Hussein or a close second. Can't a body try to explain why this is a ridiculous conceit, without being accused of condoning the very real and unjustfiable torture that Americans committed there?

|1.13.05 @ 9:27PM|#

I don't know why that post got posted twice, i blame my computer.

Warren|1.13.05 @ 9:44PM|#

What rubbish. Reason should cease printing Michael Young's work.

|1.13.05 @ 10:31PM|#

e w white,

There's something about the torture issue that brings out my mean streak. Sometimes, trolls with big sharp teeth come out of the woodwork to defend the use of torture in these threads--you're obviously not one of them. I apologize for being...whatever it was I was being.

|1.14.05 @ 9:18AM|#

It's not just that they committed torture, it's that the torture was either directly or indirectly the result of decisions made at the very highest levels of government.

Ya know, I keep seeing variations of this.

I have heard some reports of activities that probably are torture (although much of what is implicitly included in accusations of American "torture" doesn't amount to torture IMO). I'm not real happy with the long-standing policy of "rendition" for torture, and we seem to have too many folks dying in our custody. Abuses happen(ed). Point made.

What I have not seen is anything that demonstrates the abuses come from the top. Gonzalez's memos didn't set policy, so don't point to them. Bush explicitly said "no" to torture. There was some mid- to upper-level sanctioning of aggressive interrogation techniques, but what I know of these falls short of torture. Currently sanctioned interrogation practices for suspects seem to amount to giving them three squares a day, a warm place to sleep, and releasing them after three days.

Can somebody point me to something that connects the dots between abuses and high-level orders?

|1.14.05 @ 9:48AM|#

RC, go to andrewsullivan.com

gaius marius|1.14.05 @ 10:45AM|#

Can somebody point me to something that connects the dots between abuses and high-level orders?

mr dean, if your ilk had waited for the dots to be evidently connected before we jumped into this disaster, there would not have been an american abu ghraib.

as it is, there's orders of magnitude more evidence of a top-down implementation of torture than there ever was for wmd, in which you believed wholeheartedly.

don't disingenuously pretend that you care for evidence when you so recently did not. what you care for is the manifestation of the neocon ideology of your heroes -- and that is patently obvious to everyone sensible person here.

|1.14.05 @ 11:14AM|#

Gaius,what evidence do you offer?An angry rejoinder is not proof of anything.

|1.14.05 @ 11:26AM|#

Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, commander at Gitmo, was sent to Iraq to improve the gathering of intel from Iraqi prisoners. Shortly thereafter, abuse and torture became widespread in American prisons in Iraq. There's two dots for you.

People in Gitmo were tortured, according to the International Red Cross.

Prisoners in Gitmo were classified by the administration under the novel category "illegal enemy combatant."

The adminstration put promulgated the policy that illegal enemy combatants did not have to be treated in accordance with the Geneva Convention.

Condoleeza Rice has repeatdly, spedifically, endorsed the practice of "water boarding" - submerging a bound subject in water to produce the feeling of drowning.

gaius marius|1.14.05 @ 11:27AM|#

i'll help reinforce mr joe's point by doing some legwork for you, mr dean and mr brennan:

She writes: "The decision on the Geneva conventions was irrelevant to interrogation practices in Iraq." Every single report on the abuses says the exact opposite.

What's my bottom line, she demands? It is, I repeat, to stick to non-coercive techniques, as laid out in Geneva and U.S. law. Imagine that: obeying the law of the land. (And I know of no solid cases where the use of torture has led to actionable and useful intelligence in any case.) By the way, that's Bush's official position as well. More important, my bottom line is to send a very strong signal that anything else will not be tolerated. Bush should have fired Sanchez and Abizaid and Rumsfeld and Miller immediately after getting the first reports from Abu Ghraib. He didn't. Even when the photos surfaced, he refused to discipline anyone truly responsible. When more and more reports of torture emerged, he had another chance to fire the generals and officials responsible for conflicting messages and winking at abuse. Why didn't he? Or do we really want to know the answer to that question?

i submit that he didn't fire these men -- but instead protected and even promoted them -- and took no investigative steps in the face of years of prior protest from watchdogs like human rights watch and the international red cross -- precisely because they were following directives that were decided by the president at the cabinet level.

the reason gonzalez offered the memo he did is because he was asked to produce a document articulating a legal position justifying torture. what kind of dialectic do you imagine is going on in the white house that asks for that opinion, mr dean?

bush's "official" position is, of course, no torture. nixon's official position was that we were not in cambodia. reagan's official position was that we did not trade arms for hostages. of what value are official positions in the duplicitous offices of the white house in crisis? none. if you were half the skeptic of government you believe yourself to be, this would be obvious.

in any case, seymour hersh has already examined this question in some detail with scads of sources. i suggest you read it precisely because it articulates clearly that which you do not wish to see. i cite the economist's review of the book:

The Bush administration's response to the torture committed by American soldiers at Abu Ghraib illustrates a pattern of behaviour described again and again in Mr Hersh's book (even though only about a fifth of the book actually deals with the story of Abu Ghraib). Soon after September 11th, Mr Bush issued a secret presidential order setting up covert teams of commandos to scour the globe to capture, interrogate and kill terrorists. Such teams were authorised to operate outside the law. Mr Bush later issued an order declaring that any captured al-Qaeda or Taliban fighters would not be deemed prisoners of war covered by the Geneva Conventions, and that in the war on terror he had the right to suspend the conventions whenever he wished. Donald Rumsfeld, Mr Bush's defence secretary, expressed repeated disdain for the conventions.

Teams of lawyers within the government, most of them political appointees, formulated new legal policies that redefined torture as limited to the pain equivalent to "major organ failure or death". They argued that in any case the president, as the commander-in-chief in the war on terror, could not be bound by international treaties or federal laws forbidding torture. When interrogations of prisoners at Guantánamo yielded little in the way of intelligence, Mr Rumsfeld authorised new, harsher interrogation techniques. The general who developed these techniques was sent to Iraq, to "improve" interrogations there as well, since Iraq's insurgency was growing, and the American forces there had little knowledge of whom they were fighting. Torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib soon became routine.

Before all this became public, repeated complaints about what was happening at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo were made to senior administration officials by the International Red Cross, human-rights groups, a number of CIA and military officers, and even by a group of Pentagon lawyers. When photographs and videos of the torture at Abu Ghraib fell into the hands of Mr Hersh and an American television station last April, Mr Rumsfeld first brushed the issue aside, then professed himself shocked. Mr Bush denied all knowledge and blamed some bad apples.

A few low-level American guards stupid enough to have themselves photographed torturing and humiliating prisoners have been charged. A few dozen others have been reprimanded or discharged. No intelligence officers who conducted the interrogations, nor anyone higher up the chain of command, have been charged. Official investigations have been launched. None has blamed any senior official. Asked about the clear evidence of widespread torture, Mr Bush said simply that "the instructions went out to our people to adhere to the law." He later declared that "freedom from torture is an inalienable human right" and that the United States "remains steadfastly committed to upholding the Geneva Conventions."

It is this brazenness which amazes Mr Hersh, a man who has spent a lifetime exposing the deceptions of politicians.

the (pro-war, mind you) economist says elsewhere:

The accounts come from multiple sources, which adds to their credibility. If they are indeed true, three points emerge. First, harsher interrogation techniques were permitted after September 11th with al-Qaeda in mind; second, these methods were copied in Iraq, even though few of the prisoners there are al-Qaeda members; third, a chain of command was evident.

i submit in the face of all this that it takes an illusioned, politician-adoring man to deny that torture was the willful expedient of the white house.

however, anyone who is delusional enough to repeat

Currently sanctioned interrogation practices for suspects seem to amount to giving them three squares a day, a warm place to sleep, and releasing them after three days.

... as something more than ironic humor is probably not going to be swayed by any compilation of evidence.

|1.14.05 @ 11:59AM|#

"Gonzalez's memos didn't set policy, so don't point to them."

According to the Schlesinger Report, which I linked to above, it appears that the Gonzales Torture Memo did set policy. You can say that it didn't, over and over again, but that doesn't mean it didn't.

|1.14.05 @ 12:05PM|#

RC Dean,

See the paragraph which starts, "In the Summer of 2002..." on pdf page 9 0f 126, and, please note, tha the Gonzales Torture Memo is dated August 1, 2002 and contains the verbiage described in this paragraph.

...Read it and weep.

|1.14.05 @ 12:57PM|#

The word "impeachment" gets thrown around way too much, but orderring torture would seem to qualify as an appropriate offense, no?

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