News Intelligence Analysis
May 5, 2004
The Torture Photos
It seems gloomily possible that in years to come, when people
in the Middle East recall the invasion of Iraq, they will speak
not of lost American lives or the toppling of a brutal dictator.
The most enduring image of the occupation may be those pictures
of grinning American soldiers torturing Iraqi prisoners. This
is the kind of outcome no one wanted, although one that the Bush
administration should have worried about long ago, and taken
far more care to avert. Now all the president and his top officials
can do is clean up the mess and express the country's deep regrets.
So far, they have accomplished neither.
By now, the images of uniformed American men and women gleefully brutalizing prisoners in exactly the manner most horrific to Muslims has been seared into the minds of television viewers around the world. Members of Congress were more than justified yesterday in worrying about the safety of American soldiers. Senators on the Armed Services Committee, furious that a report on the abuses made it to the Internet before Capitol Hill, were right to protest and demand an investigation.
The revelations from the Abu Ghraib prison called for some humility, an apology to the abused men and an immediate, full and public accounting of what happened and who was responsible. Instead, the Bush administration began one of its now-classic defensive maneuvers. President Bush and his top officials portrayed the acts as the aberrant work of a handful of men and women, even as they knew — or should have known — that the Army was conducting criminal investigations into more than 20 different incidents in Iraq and Afghanistan, many involving prisoner deaths.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who clung to euphemisms for what any reasonable person would view as torture, rejected the idea that the government had been covering up the scandal by pointing out that the military had announced the first investigation into the Abu Ghraib case in January. That is true, but no details were made public, even though many were available.
In the subsequent three and a half months, despite opening six investigations, the Pentagon made no further accounting to the public or to Congress. Indeed, a horrifying report commissioned by the Army was classified "secret," although Mr. Rumsfeld had to admit yesterday that he did not know why. Mr. Rumsfeld also said, unbelievably, that he had not yet finished reading the report on the Abu Ghraib prison. At another point he seemed to shrug off the brutal treatment of the prisoners as the sort of thing that can happen in a system that is not "perfect" — a distressing echo of his costly dismissal of the looting in Baghdad last year as the "untidiness" of freedom.
With the administration's familiar disdain for public disclosure, the Pentagon did not share the report with Congress until it was forced to do so this week, after the report was described in a New Yorker article. There are still many unanswered questions, about issues like the military's failure to train prison guards properly and the role of military intelligence and private contractors in the abuses.
With each setback and blunder in Iraq, the administration has reacted this way, cheerfully denying that anything happened and sticking to its original plans while international support for the occupation has steadily fallen to its current minimal level. Recovering from this latest horror will require a lot more than that sort of business as usual.
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
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See Also:
The Prisoner Abuse Directory
go to the
Yurica Report's Directory
to read all the latest revelations
and studies revealing prisoner
abuse. Directory of Prisoner
Abuse Articles.