A Day Late and A Dollar Short

With the coverage of U.S. torture of Iraqi prisoners, various political players and factions are quickly stepping into their expected roles. We have President Bush expressing outrage - a response not so much to the report of the torture, which has apparently been on his desk for a couple of months, but to its being made public. We have the absurd claim by the torturers that they didn't know that torturing and sexually abusing their prisoners was wrong, and their general pulling a classic "Sergeant Shultz" maneuver - "I see nothing. I hear nothing. I know nothing" - but adding that if the abuses happened, they were encouraged by the intelligence officers in charge of the cellblock at issue. And we have some people on the "pro-war left" suggesting that the inevitable rage this will inspire in the Arab world is unfair, because Hussein's tortures were worse than ours, and because many Arab governments commit worse acts as a matter of routine.

With no disrespect meant to the military, it is pretty much a given that over the course of a military conflict some soldiers and even some officers will act inappropriately toward prisoners. The U.S. military is better than most at minimizing such incidents. But in this situation, the system broke down. The military could have built appropriate safeguards into its management of the prison to protect against this type of abuse. If the General formerly in charge of the prison is to believed, it in fact did so in all cellblocks but the one where the torture took place. Obviously the prisoners did not feel at liberty to complain about their torture, or if they did their complaints were ignored.

Like so many other things that have gone wrong over the course of the occupation, I am left wondering why appropriate preventive measures were not in place to keep this from happening - even granting that we cannot prevent isolated or spontaneous incidents of misconduct, this was neither - and why we again seemed so unprepared to deal with public disclosure. General Karpinski was suspended over misconduct in the prison in January - a fact that could not have escaped the notice of Bush's key advisors even if Bush himself chose to remain ignorant of the specifics. The report on the torture in her prison was completed in February. Granted, it is hard to "spin" this type of story, but we might have softened its impact had our leaders been expressing "outrage" before the pictures were broadcast on Al Jazeera.

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