Posted on: Thursday, May 13, 2004

EDITORIAL
Torture, violence are separate issues

A concerted attempt on the part of some to limit the political damage from the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib must be seen by right-thinking Americans as the illogical and cowardly deception that it is.

The strategy appears to comprise accusations that the news media are overreacting (Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., said he was "more outraged by the outrage" than by the treatment of prisoners), followed by an attempt to hang the whole affair on eight or 10 enlisted reservists.

The insidious implication from this camp is that the press makes a bigger deal out of the humiliation of a few prisoners ("letting off steam" or a fraternity prank) than, say, the killing and mutilation of four civilian contractors April 11 in Fallujah or the despicable beheading of a civilian last week in Baghdad.

Hardly. The horror we feel at the mutilations and beheading cannot be overstressed. This was grotesque behavior that does nothing to advance the cause of the Iraqi people and unfairly stains the name of Islam.

But to suggest that the matter of prison torture at the hands of Americans should now be set aside is fatuous. Such arguments only obscure the ill-treatment of prisoners, most of whom were, according to Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba and others, not guilty of anything. They also distract from evidence that increasingly suggests similar patterns of abuse in other Iraqi facilities, and in Af-ghanistan and Guantánamo, Cuba.

"Minimizing the conduct of these MPs by comparing it to the reckless and violent acts of the Iraqi insurgents is wholly beside the point," wrote James D. Villa, a former commander of the MP unit now at the center of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, in yesterday's Washington Post. "We must compare our actions to those of the men and women who have honorably served this country as soldiers, sailors, Marines and airmen.

"We must look to them, and to our own standards of conduct, and not to people who would wantonly kill and terrorize innocents.

"If our claim is merely that we are better than the terrorists, we leave a tenuous legacy for a budding democracy in Iraq."

It's important to remember that the activities at Abu Ghraib occurred on behalf of an occupation force that had promised to liberate and democratize Iraq, and to free it, as President Bush is so fond of saying, from "rape rooms and torture chambers."

The stain from Abu Ghraib extends to those leaders who failed to anticipate the violence and chaos that followed the invasion of Iraq, and sent American soldiers out to handle it without the necessary resources, manpower and training.