Mother Jones Magazine's blog, MoJo, has an analysis on the Abu Ghraib scandal to date that is important reading:
Even the war party pundits are recognizing the despicable nature of what American military police and intelligence officers did at Abu Ghraib prison last year. The routine humiliation and mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners, Jed Babbin of National Review concedes righteously, was "in violation of the Geneva Conventions and common decency." But Babbin -- like so many other fervent supporters of the Bush Administration's war -- seems exclusively worried about the admittedly massive damage done to the shaky credibility of that war. Babbin's recommendation: Throw the accused in Leavenworth and move on.
We have to handle this right. The courts martial should be open to any media that want to attend — even al-Jazeera -- and the perpetrators' names dragged through the mud. Those who are guilty should be imprisoned for as long as the law allows. No plea bargains, no deals -- just the max. As a result of their actions, these few have dishonored their country and every soldier, sailor, airman, and Marine who now serve. And they have created a firestorm of anger at the American presence in Iraq that reaches all through that country and the whole region. The damage they have done will reverberate throughout the process of forming the new Iraqi government. By trying the perps publicly and quickly, and imposing the harshest sentences possible, we can begin to repair the damage.
Absent from Babbin's bubble of concern, naturally, are the prisoners themselves. And, predictably, Babbin argues that the crimes were "the acts of a few, and have no relationship to the conduct of the tens of thousands of Americans who have fought in this war." He even manages to take a swipe at John Kerry in the process.
Babbin is right in concluding that the Abu Ghraib torturers have done great damage to Washington's attempts to portray its occupation of Iraq as a momentary police action following the nation's 'liberation.' But he seems singularly unwilling to recognize the damage done to the self-inflating rhetoric he and other war party pundits have peddled since Baghdad fell -- the rhetoric which snidely assumes that all opponents of the war (cue swipe at Kerry) are unpatriotic appeasers or naive tools of terror. And Babbin's final assertion simply won't fly. As Seymour Hersh writes in his excellent New Yorker piece, the fifty-three-page investigative report written by Major General Antonio M. Taguba "amounts to an unsparing study of collective wrongdoing and the failure of Army leadership at the highest levels."
The picture he draws of Abu Ghraib is one in which Army regulations and the Geneva conventions were routinely violated, and in which much of the day-to-day management of the prisoners was abdicated to Army military-intelligence units and civilian contract employees. Interrogating prisoners and getting intelligence, including by intimidation and torture, was the priority.
...
As the photographs from Abu Ghraib make clear, these detentions have had enormous consequences: for the imprisoned civilian Iraqis, many of whom had nothing to do with the growing insurgency; for the integrity of the Army; and for the United States' reputation in the world.
Andy McNab, writing in the British Telegraph, worries about a far more immediate and deadly form of fallout. McNab, who was actually imprisoned at Abu Ghraib during the first Gulf War, writes:
[T]he photographs of the Americans taunting and insulting their Iraqi prisoners, stripping them naked and forcing them to undergo mock-executions and to simulate sex with each other, will have convinced thousands of Iraqis that the Americans are just as bad as Saddam's torturers. If there were any Iraqis who believed the coalition's claim that they were benign liberators, there won't be many now.
The soldiers responsible for the abuse have guaranteed thousands of new recruits to the organisations such as al-Qaeda which want to kill as many coalition troops in Iraq as possible. The images of torture they have created will have stiffened the resolve of the Iraqi militants and encouraged those Iraqis who were wavering to join the resistance against the coalition. So more young American soldiers will be blown apart by booby-trapped cars and shot by snipers. Their unnecessary deaths will have been caused by the stupidity of their own comrades.
