President Bush and our military leaders have a duty to respond forcefully to the physical abuse and humiliation of Iraqi prisoners by U.S. personnel.
Published May 4, 2004
The documented abuse of Iraqi prisoners at the hands of U.S. authorities at Abu Ghraib prison violates every standard of American democracy and all norms of international justice. In the context of a military occupation that has gone terribly wrong in almost every other important respect, these abuses further sabotage the Bush administration's efforts to win support for the war effort within Iraq, among neighboring Arab states and throughout the civilized world. To limit the political fallout from these atrocities and reinforce a sense of honor and discipline in our forces, President Bush and our entire political and military leadership must commit themselves to a thorough investigation that leads to the punishment of all those accountable, no matter how high their rank.
So far, our government's official response has been unsatisfactory. President Bush rightly said he was disgusted by the evidence that Iraqi prisoners had been abused and sexually humiliated, but he suggested that only a handful of low-level prison guards were responsible. That view is contradicted by an internal Army investigation, which determined that high-ranking U.S. military intelligence officers and civilian contractors were "either directly or indirectly responsible" for "sadistic, blatant and wanton criminal abuses." The report "strongly recommended disciplinary action" against at least two intelligence officers and two contractors.
That report was completed in February but was kept under wraps until recently, when photographs documenting some of the abuse at Abu Ghraib were published around the world. Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, blandly claimed Sunday that he still had not seen the investigative report. He said it was still "working its way up" to him.
A true leader would have demanded to see the report as soon as it was completed - and then he would have made a public commitment to identify and punish all those responsible for the abuse.
In another respect, though, Myers' incuriosity is not surprising. The abuses at Abu Ghraib are symptomatic of the broader failures and false assumptions for which Myers and the other architects of the U.S. war effort are accountable.
They are the ones who chose to rely so heavily on poorly trained and understaffed reservists such as those who have been responsible for operating Abu Ghraib. They are the ones who chose to place so much authority in the hands of intelligence officers and civilian mercenaries who are not subject to the normal military chain of command. They are the ones who chose to house prisoners at Abu Ghraib, a prison long notorious as a repository for Saddam Hussein's torture of political opponents. And they are the ones who failed to give our troops the resources they needed to prevent the widespread looting, sabotage and guerrilla attacks that have undercut our efforts to win popular support in Iraq in the year since President Bush declared major combat operations there to have ended.
The president has cast the war in Iraq as a battle between good and evil. Those high-minded claims may ring hollow to the millions of people around the world who have seen the grotesque images of U.S. troops ritually torturing and humiliating Iraqi prisoners. They may also ring hollow to those who also see U.S. authorities desperately turning to former officers of Hussein's Republican Guard to restore order in Fallujah and other restive Iraqi cities.
Atrocities and acts of inhumanity, on all sides, are an inevitable byproduct of war. Civilized democracies distinguish themselves from more brutal societies by setting the highest standards of conduct for their troops and insisting on justice whenever those standards are violated. To restore any shred of credibility for the supposed goals of this war, the Bush administration must demonstrate - to the American people, to the Iraqi people and to the world - that our personnel in Iraq, as well as the civilian and military leaders who sent them there, will be held to the highest standards of honor.
