Sy Hersh in the Guardian
Guardian Unlimited | Guardian Weekly | Abu Ghraib's lesson unlearned:
There is much more to be learned. What do I know? A few things stand out. I know of the continuing practice of American operatives seizing suspected terrorists and taking them, without any meaningful legal review, to interrogation centres in southeast Asia and elsewhere. I know of the young special forces officer whose subordinates were confronted with charges of prisoner abuse and torture at a secret hearing after one of them emailed explicit photos back home. The officer testified that, yes, his men had done what the photos depicted, but they - and everybody in the command - understood such treatment was condoned by higher-ups.
What else do I know? I know that the decision was made inside the Pentagon in the first weeks of the Afghanistan war - which seemed "won" by December 2001 - to indefinitely detain scores of prisoners who were accumulating daily at American staging posts throughout the country. At the time, according to a memo in my possession addressed to defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld, there were "800-900 Pakistani boys 13-15 years of age in custody". I could not learn if some or all have been released, or if some are still held.
posted by AmyN @ 6/29/2005 08:11:00 PM
4 comments
4 Comments:
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Is it an indication that I take a slightly different take on the Abu Ghraib story than Amy does - less focused on the acts of torture (which uneducated and unsupervised people will always indulge in when confronted by hostile strangers) and more on the responsibility of our elected officials to prevent the otherwise inevitable - that I should have excerpted the penultimate paragraph of the Hersh extract for citing?
With apologies in advance for a combative retort, RJ:
If I truly believed that the acts of torture were perpetrated simply by a few uneducated and unsupervised people, I wouldn't be so up in arms about it. Well-educated and well-supervised people will also indulge in torture when the entire chain of command tacitly and/or explicitly urges them to do it. And this is clearly what Hersh thinks has happened.
I think it's interesting that you comment specifically about Abu Ghraib -- since my Hersh quote did not mention Abu Ghraib, but discussed instead the entire regime of American detention and interrogation facilities. Do you find it easier to subsume "torture" under Abu Ghraib, so that you can compartmentalize it into a thing that some uneducated and unsupervised kids did? If that's the case, then education and supervision will solve the problem, and we ourselves can be blamed only for failing to urge our elected leaders to educate and supervise. Sounds so much less serious and damning than saying we are responsible for torturing children, doesn't it?
My zeroing in on Abu Ghraib was sloppy. The reason for my choosing a different paragraph to cite is that my outrage is focused not on the acts of terror but on the impunity of responsible officials. These officials seem not merely to have condoned, but to have encouraged, the abominable urges of the torturers. While I realize that nothing can atone for the indignities done (not to mention loss of life!), and that the torture of any individual is unspeakably evil, it is not the evil that grips me in this case. People are horrible to one another all the time. But in this, it has official sanction. That's unspeakably evil, too.
Post a Comment
<< Home