The International Committee of the Red Cross
warned many high officials in the U.S. government last January and earlier that it had observed
widespread abuse of Iraqi prisoners “tantamount to
torture.” The ICRC characterized this treatment not as the aberrant
behavior of a few but “a pattern and a system,” which, like the Army’s own report by Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba,
gives the lie to Army Chief of Staff Gen. Peter Schoomaker and his boss, Chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff Gen. Richard Meyers.
Schoomaker claimed as recently as yesterday in
his Senate testimony that what happened at Abu Ghraib prison was the “inexcusable behavior of a
few.” He was hewing to the line set by Meyers, who, you may
recall, spent last weekend on the morning talk shows blaming a mere “handful” of low-ranking
soldiers and complaining about inaccurate reporting by the press.
On the same day of their testimony in Congress, the ICRC director of operations, Pierre
Kraehenbuehl, said the abuse represented more than isolated acts, and the problems were not
limited to the Abu Ghraib prison. “We were dealing here with a broad pattern, not individual acts.
There was a pattern and a system,” he told a news conference
in Geneva.
The ICRC’s 24-page report, leaked Friday in The Wall Street Journal, “described prisoners
kept naked in total darkness in empty cells at Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib prison and male prisoners
forced to parade around in women’s underwear. Coalition forces also fired on unarmed prisoners
from watchtowers, killing some of them.”
Paul Bremer, the U.S. administrator in Iraq, and U.S. military commanders were given this
report, which summarizes previous ICRC investigations, in February. (The ICRC, based in
Switzerland, is a neutral organization. Under the Geneva Conventions it visits prisoners of war
and others detained by an occupying power, to see that countries fulfill their obligations under the
1949 accords.)
Equally astonishing are this morning’s
revelations in The New York Times that the official “who directed the
reopening of the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq last year and trained the guards there resigned under
pressure as director of the Utah Department of Corrections in 1997 after an inmate died while
shackled to a restraining chair for 16 hours. The inmate, who suffered from schizophrenia, was
kept naked the whole time.”
The official, Lane McCotter, 63, “later became an executive of a private prison company, one
of whose jails was under investigation by the Justice Department when he was sent to Iraq as part
of a team of prison officials, judges, prosecutors and police chiefs.” And who picked McCotter
and the others? That exemplary enforcer and protector of the law, none other than Attorney
General John Ashcroft.
As Fox Butterfield reports: “When Mr. Ashcroft announced the appointment of the team to
restore Iraq’s criminal justice system last year, including Mr. McCotter,” here’s what Ashcroft
said: “Now all Iraqis can taste liberty in their native land, and we will help make that freedom
permanent by assisting them to establish an equitable criminal justice system based on the rule of
law and standards of basic human rights.”
You might conclude from this that our Maximum Leader’s apology to the world for America’s
moral hypocrisy is less than sincere. You might even conclude from this that “torture and abuse”
(to use Sen. Edward Kennedy’s forthright phrase in yesterday’s Senate hearing) is as American as
apple pie. To read Butterfield’s report, you wouldn’t be wrong.
“Physical and sexual abuse of prisoners, similar to what has been uncovered in Iraq, takes
place in American prisons with little public knowledge or concern,” he writes. Merely have a look
at the photo of the naked Araqi prisoner bound to a bed in Abu Ghraib with women’s panties
covering his face (fourth image in the Washington Post
slideshow) and compare it to Butterfield’s description that
prison inmates in Pennsylvania and other states “are routinely stripped in front of other inmates,”
and in an Arizona jail male inmates “are made to wear women’s pink underwear as a form of
humiliation.”
The ugly icing on this rotten cake? Experts told Butterfield, “the worst abuses have occurred
in Texas,” where the prison system had to be put “under a consent decree during much of the time
President Bush was governor because of violence by guards against inmates. …”
So when our Maximum Leader, his Rummy boy and the Pentagon generals defend American
honor with, respectively, expressions of regret, a deep apology, and hangdog looks on their faces,
it should surprise no one that people will doubt their sincerity.
