Postcards from the Edge

By Tom Engelhardt, Tomdispatch.com. Posted May 9, 2004.

"The next day [January 14, 2004], Gen. John Abizaid, commander of all U.S. forces in the region, was on the phone to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld. 'General Abizaid informed the leadership within hours of the incident,' said a senior Pentagon official. Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, the military's spokesman in Iraq, also called the Pentagon, though with more alarming words. 'He said, "We've got a really bad situation," recalled one official, who like others requested anonymity. 'The evidence is damaging and horrific,' 'We've got a really bad situation...'

"Abizaid talked daily with Rumsfeld about Iraq, and the prison investigation likely came up often, officials said. Top Pentagon leaders, such as Rumsfeld and Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, as well as President Bush were kept aware of the situation, said Gen. Peter Pace, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, on the CBS Early Show yesterday." (Tom Bowman, the Baltimore Sun)

The Torture System

It's worth starting with the basics, because they are what you're likely to see the least of in the uproar at hand.

The system of injustice that, since 9/11, we've sent offshore and organized globally -- from Guantanamo, Cuba to Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan -- is by its nature also a system of torture. It was designed from the beginning to be a Bermuda Triangle of injustice, existing in an extrajudicial darkness beyond "our" sight or oversight. There, on military bases and in special military-controlled prisons, the "war on terrorism" could be carried to its informational climax in whatever ways and by whatever methods American intelligence officials felt might "break" whatever prisoners we had.

Whether in Guantanamo or at Abu Ghraib in Iraq, this developing mini-gulag was never meant to be a system of imprisonment for crimes -- hence the lack of charges, no less trials of any sort, anywhere in the imperium. It was to be an eternal holding operation for the purpose of information extraction (and possibly revenge). The men (and woman) running the Bush administration's foreign policy in this period didn't have to specify the actual use of torture, though some of them seem to have done so. We know from the Sunday Washington Post that, in April 2003, after "debates" on the subject, Pentagon officials at "the highest levels" approved twenty "psychologically stressful" methods of interrogation, most or all of which any sane person would classify as torture, including the questioning of naked prisoners, and that these methods were later approved at least for "high-value detainees" in Iraq. In the meantime, there was a good deal of post-9/11 torture chatter in the media about how much of it we could, should, and would use in a war to the death against a fanatic enemy.

Both the President and his Pentagon chief claimed to be "shocked" or "disgusted" by the forms a torture system took -- by its look. Yes, they had been informed of what had happened at Abu Ghraib prison, but those, after all, were just words, months of words. The difference was the images on television and in the press. "We saw the pictures," said the President. "It is the photographs that gives one the vivid realization of what actually took place," said his secretary of defense. "Words don't do it. The words that there were abuses, that it was cruel, that it was inhumane, all of which is true, that it was blatant, you read that and it's one thing. You see the photographs and you get a sense of it, and you cannot help but be outraged."

That is in itself a kind of confession, if you consider it for a moment. You cannot help but be outraged. All those previous months from mid-January 2004 on, when he and his president assumedly only knew about the "words" (grim enough certainly in General Taguba's report), when they were, in the pungent phrase of Gen. Peter Pace, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs, "apprised orally," our secretary of defense and our President could evidently "help but be outraged." And that tells us a great deal.

They could, it seems, practice "deniability" not only on us but on themselves. Human beings are as capable of this as they are of turning into animals and torturing other human beings. But whatever deceptions they may have practiced on themselves, the simple fact is that the penal system they set up was a torture system.

The Bush administration, while speaking loudly of bringing its version of democracy to the Middle East, was also eager, as Adam Hochschild wrote for Tomdispatch many months ago, to bring the developing "age of human rights" to a speedy end in the pursuit of what former CIA director and enthusiastic neocon James Woolsey liked to call "World War IV," which was imagined, like the Cold War, as a many decades long slog to victory in which only the toughest, those willing to wield brute power and commit the most difficult acts, would survive.

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