Doin' the Abu Ghraib spin

EDITORIAL
May 12, 2004

The Abu Ghraib Spin

The administration and its Republican allies appear to have settled on a way to deflect attention from the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib: accuse Democrats and the news media of overreacting, then pile all of the remaining responsibility onto officers in the battlefield, far away from President Bush and his political team. That cynical approach was on display yesterday morning in the second Abu Ghraib hearing in the Senate, a body that finally seemed to be assuming its responsibility for overseeing the executive branch after a year of silently watching the bungled Iraq occupation.

The senators called one witness for the morning session, the courageous and forthright Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba, who ran the Army's major investigation into Abu Ghraib. But the Defense Department also sent Stephen Cambone, the under secretary of defense for intelligence, to upstage him. Mr. Cambone read an opening statement that said Donald Rumsfeld was deeply committed to the Geneva Conventions protecting the rights of prisoners, that everyone knew it and that any deviation had to come from "the command level." A few Republican senators loyally followed the script, like Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma, who offered the astounding comment that he was "more outraged by the outrage" than by the treatment of prisoners. After all, he said, they were probably guilty of something.

These silly arguments not only obscure the despicable treatment of the prisoners, most of whom are not guilty of anything, but also ignore the evidence so far. While some of the particularly sick examples of sexual degradation may turn out to be isolated events, General Taguba's testimony, and a Red Cross report from Iraq, made it plain that the abuse of prisoners by the American military and intelligence agencies was systemic. The Red Cross said prisoners of military intelligence were routinely stripped, with their hands bound behind their backs, and posed with women's underwear over their heads. It said they were "sometimes photographed in this position."

The Red Cross report, published by The Wall Street Journal, said that Iraqi prisoners — 70 to 90 percent of whom apparently did nothing wrong — were routinely abused when they were arrested, and their wives and mothers threatened. The Iraqi police, who operate under American control and are eventually supposed to help replace the occupation forces, are even worse — sending those who won't pay bribes to prison camps, and beating and burning prisoners, according to the report.

The Red Cross said most prisoners were treated better once they got into the general population at the larger camps, except those who were held by military intelligence. "In certain cases, such as in Abu Ghraib military intelligence section, methods of physical and psychological coercion used by the interrogators appeared to be part of the standard operating procedures by military intelligence personnel," the report said.

It was alarming yesterday to hear General Taguba report that military commanders had eased the rules four times last year to permit guards to use "lethal force" on unruly prisoners. The hearing also disclosed that Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the commander in Iraq, had authorized the presence of attack dogs during interrogation sessions. It wasn't very comforting that he had directed that these dogs be muzzled.

These practices go well beyond any gray area of American values, international law or the Geneva Conventions. Mr. Cambone tried to argue that Mr. Rumsfeld had made it clear to everyone that the prisoners in Iraq were covered by those conventions. But Mr. Rumsfeld's public statements have been ambiguous at best, and General Taguba said that, in any case, the Abu Ghraib guards had received no training. All the senators, government officials and generals assembled in that hearing room yesterday could not figure out who had been in charge at Abu Ghraib and which rules applied to the Iraqi prisoners. How were untrained reservists who had been plucked from their private lives to guard the prisoners supposed to have managed it?

General Sanchez did give some misguided orders involving the Abu Ghraib prison and prisoners in general. But the deeply flawed mission in which he participates is the responsibility of the Bush administration. It was Mr. Bush and Mr. Rumsfeld, not General Sanchez, who failed to anticipate the violence and chaos that followed the invasion of Iraq, and sent American soldiers out to handle it without the necessary resources, manpower and training.

[Tom Storer]

Good article. The headlines now are all saying that General Taguba said in his testimony that "no direct orders were given for abuse." That begs the question "direct orders from whom?" since in his report he makes it clear that the guards were encouraged in their abuse and praised for it by the military intelligence personnel and shadowy "contractors"--who, so far, have apparently not been bothered for their role. "Soften him up," "give him the treatment," "good job"... maybe these are not "direct orders for abuse," but they're close enough. It's outrageous that these intelligence people, whether government functionaries or secretive "contractors," are being discreetly passed over while the untrained, unsupervised reservists they easily influenced are getting virtually all of the blame and are the only ones, so far, held fully accountable. Admonish a general and a few officers, court-martial the guards, but let the political higher-ups off with some tough questions from senators and effusive praise from the president, and handle the intelligence people who were the driving force of the abuse with kid gloves. Disgusting.

Meanwhile, there are reports this morning that female inmates of Abu Ghraib are claiming to have been regularly raped, either by American soldiers or by Iraqi policemen within view of American soldiers. Here's hoping this doesn't prove to have been "systemic."

[crawjo]

Well, I think we clearly need to know more than we do right now before deciding who is to blame for this. Right now, the reports about the statements that MI and the special contractors made are coming from the Taguba report, which largely relied on those who are accused of this abuse. It may be that these people are trying to pass the blame for their conduct off onto these other people. How much blame these other people deserve is an important question. "Soften him up" can mean a lot of things. There are "legitimate" ways of softening up a detainee in order to gain information from him, though it doesn't seem that these MPs were aware of the more nuanced approaches to prisoner treatment that are favored by the CIA and FBI. (There was a very good article about this in the New York Times Magazine several months ago. There are ways of "softening" someone up or "giving them the treatment" that do not violate the Geneva convention.) I suspect, however, that many people were aware of the type of stuff going on in Abu Ghraib and just chose to look the other way because it was the convenient thing to do. Shameful. Disgusting.