Devil's bargains. How parlous is the state our supine corporate media is in? They had to wait for moral cover from George W. Bush to talk about the revelations of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib:

President Bush said Friday that he was deeply disgusted by reports that Iraqi detainees were abused by American military police, and he vowed that any soldier found to be at fault would be punished.

Mr. Bush spoke in the White House Rose Garden on a day that photographs circulated around the globe showing American soldiers smiling, laughing and holding their thumbs up as naked Iraqi detainees were forced into sexually abusive and humiliating positions. ...

The American military in Iraq announced on March 20 that six members of an Army Reserve military police unit assigned to Abu Ghraib prison west of Baghad faced charges of assault, cruelty, indecent acts and maltreatment of detainees.

Thom Shanker and Jacques Steinberg, "Bush Voices 'Disgust' at Abuse of Iraqi Prisoners"

If you missed that Mar. 20 announcement, don't feel too bad: the Times buried Thom Shanker's cursory writeup of the announcement, and never recurred to the topic again in the following month. Likewise the AP, the LA Times, and Knight-Ridder, all of whom ran the announcement without devoting further attention to it. (According to a very brief Knight-Ridder add-on the next day, "CNN quoted Pentagon sources as saying that some soldiers took photos of prisoners who were partially nude, and some portrayed inappropriate physical contact between soldiers and detainees": again, no followup to that report.) It's interesting to note that on Mar. 24, a number of articles datelined Abu Ghraib appeared in the American press, mostly picking up an AP account of the release of 272 coalition "security detainees" from the prison. Looking back, it's hard not to think that the release was intended as some kind of misdirection play.

How Dubya is even allowed an expression of disgust in this matter—much less allowed to lead the first substantial press reaction to it—is beyond me. Seymour Hersh, writing an essential, impressively detailed account of the incidents and the Army investigation for the New Yorker, nails it down in a summary graf:

As the international furor grew, senior military officers, and President Bush, insisted that the actions of a few did not reflect the conduct of the military as a whole. [Maj. Gen. Antonio] Taguba’s report, however, amounts to an unsparing study of collective wrongdoing and the failure of Army leadership at the highest levels. The picture he draws of Abu Ghraib is one in which Army regulations and the Geneva conventions were routinely violated, and in which much of the day-to-day management of the prisoners was abdicated to Army military-intelligence units and civilian contract employees. Interrogating prisoners and getting intelligence, including by intimidation and torture, was the priority.

Abu Ghraib was—is—American policy, Bush policy. It's cheap to say I'm not surprised by what's coming out, but, well, I'm not surprised. Abu Ghraib was Saddam Hussein's Lubyanka, every bit the apt imitation of its Stalinist prototype. We marched into Baghdad, and instead of razing the prison and salting the earth beneath it, as a decent respect for its victims might have demanded, we took it over. It had been emptied by Saddam's last-gasp amnesty, and we began restocking it—with our politicals, naturally. Meet the new boss, indeed. Can Iraqis have had any doubt about the message that symbolism was supposed to send? Can the Americans?

One of the things that started me in the blogging direction was a December Sixty Minutes report that prominently featured the now-relieved Gen. Janis Karpinski in her role as commandant of Abu Ghreib. The report wasn't about the torture of prisoners: its focus was on the hounding and imprisonment of anti-Saddam Iraqi democrats by American troops, who in Karbala at least appeared to have made a devil's bargain with ex-Baathist security agents to maintain civil order. The sequence in which Steve Croft attempted to retrieve information from Karpinski about one such oppositionist, a former Karbala city councilor who had been held incommunicado for more than a month in Abu Ghreib, had me literally shaking with anger.

"We have prisoners in all of our facilities who, I mean there's nobody being held for no reason," says Karpinski. "There's foundation or, or charges for all of our prisoners."

60 Minutes followed Gen. Karpinski to the computer room and waited. She had told us that all prisoners were charged after an initial 72-hour processing period. But Najeeb al Shami had been in Abu Ghreib for more than a month.

Finally, she was able to find him.

"We've located the individual you were asking about and the process for him, the in-processing portion is not completed yet, and I've been asked not to release any additional information because his in-processing is not completed yet," says Karpinski.

Obviously, Kroft said, it’s taken a lot longer than 72 hours to process al Shami’s case.

60 Minutes was then asked to turn off the camera. Gen. Karpinski told us that al Shami was "suspected of crimes against the coalition," and had not yet been charged, and would not necessarily be allowed access to his family and lawyers.

Watching stone-faced, gimlet-eyed Warden Karpinski slowly close the lid on al Shami, I couldn't avoid the thought that I was seeing exactly what too many desperate Iraqis had seen over too long during the Saddam regime—only with an American inflection. I didn't especially need to see torture pictures to know exactly what this woman was capable of overlooking, or know that she was in place precisely for her capacity to overlook. George W. Bush is responsible for Janis Karpinski, and he's responsible for Abu Ghraib, and I can't think of any more pressing reason for getting the son-of-a-bitch out of office.

posted by michael  3:59:16 PM  
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