Shared responsibility
I recommend Anne Applebaum's Thursday column in the Washington Post, "Willing Torturers" (the title is a reference to Daniel Goldhagen's famous book "Hitler's Willing Executioners"):

The American soldiers and civilians responsible for humiliating, torturing and possibly murdering Iraqi prisoners in the Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad over the past few months do not belong in the same category as Nazi or Soviet camp guards. But their actions do prove, if further proof were needed, that no culture is incapable of treating its enemies as subhuman. [...]

Americans are still as capable of torture as anyone else. Rumsfeld said yesterday that it was "un-American" to abuse prisoners -- as if Americans were still somehow exempt from the passions that grip the rest of the human race. But we aren't, and because we aren't, we shouldn't dispense with rules that have been designed to contain them.

Many of us (including myself) put up with American-argued exceptions to Geneva Conventions in Guantanamo that carried over in spirit -- not surprisingly -- to the war in Iraq. When dealing with terrorists, I thought those exceptions were defensible -- being part of a sovereign nation's armed forces is how to get the benefit of an agreement between sovereign nations, while not being part of one is a valid reason to not get those benefits.

But while that might or might not be a good point, it's certainly not good enough. How do you know that guy who's just surrendered to you really is a terrorist? How do you know another guy is just someone some other unit picked out at random* after the one they really wanted got away?

Even if you were good at apprehending only people who deserved it, you've still got two different wars going on: the one on terrorists in Afghanistan, and the one to topple a rogue dictator and pacify Iraq. Distinctions need to made, but "even" the United States armed forces don't always do distinctions or nuance very well. Especially if their secretary and president hardly ever do distinctions or nuance very well. Abridging process in Guantanamo may have led* to the gross indecencies at Abu Ghraib.

So I share some of the blame, too; I foolishly trusted this administration to make sure that acceptable standards of decency were upheld in Iraq, even after knowing it was pushing the envelope in Guantanamo - and braying that it didn't need to be accountable to anyone else about that. Now I think the country can't afford to let that continue any longer.

The price for Abu Ghraib shouldn't just include Rumsfeld's (long-overdue) resignation or reforms in the armed forces' Iraqi prison system. It should include Guantanamo being opened up to inspection and adjudication as well, and should include us treating Guantanamo prisoners under the Geneva Conventions in all respects until there's a consensus on how to legitimately handle terrorists differently.

A congressional resolution would suffice -- assuming it can be formulated and passed in the snakepit that passes for our national forum. Until then, an executive order would do -- assuming the executive doesn't think he's already done after a TV interview or a cheap apology to the nearest Arab dignitary.

The news will apparently get much worse about our own crimes and criminal negligence in Iraq: boys. An old woman. War criminals as hired guns.* I had no idea the war would mean these abuses, on this scale. I don't think it had to be this way. But since it clearly is this way, I was clearly too sanguine about "come what may" when I argued for the war. I thought it might mean many dead in a necessary war. But the war was not as necessary as I thought. And the way it's been carried out has led to more than 'just' dead, it has led to these disgraces of our country.


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* Links to or via Talking Points Memo.
UPDATE, 5/8, 6:30pm: Re-reading, I don't like my own introduction, because I'm not sure why Ms. Applebaum thinks the American soldiers guilty of crimes at Abu Ghraib don't belong in the same category with Nazi or Soviet prison guards. They may not have been at it quite as long, I suppose, but they were in the same league. I think it's a vestige of "American exceptionalism" that doesn't belong, and is a weak point in an otherwise good column. posted by Thomas Nephew at 2:35:00 AM -- |  

 
By Rove, I think he's got it
From Robin Wright's article in Friday's Washington Post, "U.S. Faces Lasting Damage Abroad":

The White House is so gloomy about the repercussions that senior adviser Karl Rove suggested this week that the consequences of the graphic photographs documenting the U.S. abuse of Iraqi detainees are so enormous that it will take decades for the United States to recover, according to a Bush adviser.

Rove's next thought: "Maybe not if we dump Rummie." My next thought: "Maybe not if we dump the lot of you." posted by Thomas Nephew at 2:30:00 AM -- |  

 
Rumsfeld Rule
Be able to resign. It will improve your value to the President and do wonders for your performance. (page 4) posted by Thomas Nephew at 12:18:00 AM -- |  

 
That's nice. Now resign.
"Rumsfeld Offers Apology for Abuse of Iraqi Prisoners" (New York Times) posted by Thomas Nephew at 10:54:00 PM -- |  

 
From Big Fat Idiot to Slimmer, Fitter Sociopath
Via "Media Matters for America," via Rush Limbaugh's own web site (login required),* some incredible statements by someone I thought couldn't surprise me any more:

CALLER: It was like a college fraternity prank that stacked up naked men --

LIMBAUGH: Exactly. Exactly my point! This is no different than what happens at the Skull and Bones initiation and we're going to ruin people's lives over it and we're going to hamper our military effort, and then we are going to really hammer them because they had a good time. You know, these people are being fired at every day. I'm talking about people having a good time, these people, you ever heard of emotional release? You of heard of need to blow some steam off? (emphases added)

Listen for yourself, MediaMatters provides an audio file (MP3). A day earlier:

LIMBAUGH: And these American prisoners of war -- have you people noticed who the torturers are? Women! The babes! The babes are meting out the torture.

LIMBAUGH: You know, if you look at -- if you, really, if you look at these pictures, I mean, I don't know if it's just me, but it looks just like anything you'd see Madonna, or Britney Spears do on stage. Maybe I'm -- yeah. And get an NEA grant for something like this. I mean, this is something that you can see on stage at Lincoln Center from an NEA grant, maybe on Sex in the City -- the movie. I mean, I don't -- it's just me.

It clearly wouldn't take much for Rush to be another Goebbels, if he isn't already. It would be interesting to get Dick Cheney's response to Rush's outburst, he just let Rush interview him a while back. Or Rumsfeld's response.

I await Washington Post media columnist Howard Kurtz's de-mainstreaming of Rush Limbaugh with bated breath.


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* ... and 129 blogs as of tonight. posted by Thomas Nephew at 10:51:00 PM -- |  

 
Abu Ghraib update
Here's the full report on Abu Ghraib by Major General Antonio Taguba: "ARTICLE 15-6 INVESTIGATION OF THE 800th MILITARY POLICE BRIGADE." Some units and soldiers come off well. Given the nature of the report, most do not.

The odds aren't bad you'll finish the report before General Myers does:

At first, General Myers insisted that the instances of mistreatment were not widespread and were the actions of "just a handful" of soldiers who had unfairly tainted all American forces in Iraq. But when pressed, he acknowledged that he had not yet read a classified, 53-page Army report completed in February by Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba, first reported in the May 10 issue of The New Yorker, that chronicled the worst of the abuses at Abu Ghraib.

Or Donald Rumsfeld* for that matter -- at least with his eyes open:

I think that -- I'm not a lawyer. My impression is that what has been charged thus far is abuse, which I believe technically is different from torture. I don't know if it is correct to say what you just said, that torture has taken place, or that there's been a conviction for torture. And therefore I'm not going to address the torture word.

"And therefore I'm not going to address the torture word." What a weasel.


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* Rumsfeld quote at Talking Points Memo; unattributed there, possibly on TV. posted by Thomas Nephew at 12:11:00 AM -- |  

 
Rumsfeld must go
Kathryn Cramer is right: Rumsfeld should resign.

The Abu Ghraib prison scandal is not a scandal -- it is an utter disgrace. While it's certainly the fault of the soldiers and officers involved, it's also a result of lack of oversight from Rumsfeld on down, and of the contractor-riddled occupation policies he's principally responsible for.

It's critical for our country's reputation that the United States not merely prosecute those directly responsible for these abuses, but also hold accountable those responsible for their presence, job description, preparation and tasking.

The disgrace and stigmatization this country and its armed forces have earned must be shared by the most senior civilian leadership at the Pentagon, as a clear warning to future Secretaries of Defense.

The strategic necessity of not leaving Iraq worse than we found it demands that the United States answer Iraqi public opinion and outrage with significant penalties at the highest as well as the lowest levels of the armed forces.

To be sure, Secretary Rumsfeld has supervised other huge mistakes that would justify his resignation: he's responsible for failing to provide enough troops to ensure post-war security in Iraq, and for failing to safeguard Iraq's uranium stockpiles after the collapse of Saddam's regime. But even these pale beside the gross violations of human rights that have happened on his watch.

It won't make it right, but it will make it a little better. For our armed services, our country, and our honor: Rumsfeld must go. posted by Thomas Nephew at 9:15:00 AM -- |  

 
A good conversation
In mid-March I wrote about Philip Pullman's thought-provoking, skeptical fantasy trilogy His Dark Materials -- and a thought-provoking review of Pullman's work by none other than the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams. Pullman and Williams are both such literate, engaging people that I was pleased to learn they were scheduled to have a conversation about the topics raised by the books, the resulting play, and the bishop's review.

Via Interfaith Nunnery, I was finally able to read the transcript of that March 17 conversation, and it was quite as interesting and enjoyable as I'd anticipated. Naturally, much of it revolved around questions of faith and spirituality (for lack of a better word), but in a remarkably friendly way for two people as different as Pullman and Williams. Yet there was some interesting common ground. As "Sister Andrea" writes:

What Pullman and Williams seem to be doing here -- despite their varying theological positions -- is rewriting the Fall as a non-negative (and, for Pullman, at least, positive) construct in order to match religion to the world as they understand it.

Another interesting line of discussion was about the paranoid/conspiratorial, "debunking" elements of today's culture:

[Pullman]: ...The word that covers some of these early creation narratives is gnostic - the Gnostic heresy, as it became once Christianity was sort of defined. The idea that the world we live in, the physical universe is actually a false thing, made by a false God, and the true God, our true home, our true spiritual home is infinitely distant, far off, a long, long way away from that. This sense is something we find a lot of in popular culture, don't you think? The X-Files, you know - "the truth is out there". The Matrix.

Everything we see is the false creation of some wicked power that, as you say, is trying to pull the wool over our eyes, and there are many others. Can I just ask you a question for a minute? What do you put this down to? The great salience of gnostic feelings, gnostic sentiments and ways of thinking in our present world? What's the source of that, do you think?

[Williams]: Well, let me try two thoughts on that. One is that the human sense that things are not in harmony, not on track, can very easily lead you into a kind of dramatic or even melodramatic picture of the universe in which somebody's got to be blamed for that.

So, "we was robbed", you know, "we have been deceived". It should have been different, it could have been different, so salvation, or whatever you want to call it, then becomes very much a matter of getting out from underneath the falsehood, pulling away the masks, and that's tremendously powerful I think, as a myth of liberation.

The description Pullman gives of Gnosticism seems to fit Catharism pretty well, too, I think (a mediaeval -- and brutally repressed -- Christian creed I mentioned in my March piece). Other parts of the conversation were interesting to me as well; this segment reminded me of the Gatto "Against School" article I wrote about last fall:

[Audience question]: Question from a fellow atheist who is appalled by the materialism of this society - how would [Pullman] recommend children develop spiritual life?

[Pullman]: I don't use the word spiritual myself, because I don't have a clear sense of what it means. But I think it depends on your view of education: whether you think that the true end and purpose of education is to help children grow up, compete and face the economic challenges of a global environment that we're going to face in the 21st century, or whether you think it's to do with helping them see that they are the true heirs and inheritors of the riches - the philosophical, the artistic, the scientific, the literary riches - of the whole world. If you believe in setting children's minds alive and ablaze with excitement and passion or whether it's a matter of filling them with facts and testing on them. It depends on your vision of education - and I know which one I'd go for.

[Williams]: I think we're entirely at one on that, I must say.

And others were just funny:

[Pullman]: Which leads us to Mel Gibson. Have you seen that film?

[Williams]: I haven't seen it.

[Pullman]: Nor have I, so we can talk about it! That's all right.

[Williams]: We're allowed opinions without the constraints of reality!

Anyhow, if you're up for a break from ugliness, spin, dishonesty, and shouting matches, have a look at this conversation. posted by Thomas Nephew at 2:14:00 PM -- |