A Few Bad Apples?

[bibliogramma]

Abu Ghraib: The Politics of Torture

A collection of essays written in 2004, following the release in print and over the Internet of the horrifyingly iconic photographs of tortured Iraqi prisoners and their torturers in Abu Ghraib; authors include Barabara Ehrenreich, Meron Benvenisti, Mark Danner, David Levi Strauss, Richard Grossinger, John Gray, David Matlin, Charles Stein and Brooke Warner.

There's a lot to consider in these early responses to the full-scale confirmation of what almost everyone on the Left believed was happening, and almost everyone else didn't want to think about. There's also a lot to think about when one considers that, two years later, after the trials and the court-martials and all the public finger-pointing and denying, it's almost certainly still happening.

The essays that directly address the experiences of the known victims of torture, and that investigate the philosophies and pragmatics that lead to an acceptance of the use of torture, are harrowing and enraging. They explode the myth of the "few bad apples" - as if anyone actually believed that in the first place.

Of particular interest is "Abu Ghraib: The Surround" by David Matlin, which places the torture of military prisoners within the greater context of the "normalization of prison and its economics" in the United States. Matlin notes that over the past 20 years, the prison population of the US has quadrupled (from 582,000 in 1980 to more than 2.1 million in 2000) and questions the relationship between a domestic culture of punitive cruelty and a military culture of torture and abuse.

Also of interest is Barbara Ehrenreich's essay, "Feminism's Assumptions Upended," which discusses the involvement of women - from Pfc Lynndie England to Brigadier General Janis Karpinsky and Major General Barbara Fast - in the atrocities of Abu Ghraib (and other military prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan, let's not forget the prisons from which no photos have emerged). Ehrenreich argues that this marks the death-knell of the strain of feminism that posits women as inherently less violent and more "moral" than men.

What we have learned from Abu Ghraib, once and for all, is that a uterus is not a substitute for a conscience. This doesn't mean that gender equality isn't worth fighting for for its own sake. It is. If we believe in democracy, then we believe in a woman's right to do and achieve whatever men can do and achieve, even the bad things. It's just that gender equality cannot, all alone, bring about a just and peaceful world.

In an early attempt to explore the possible implications of the revelation of the use of Torture at Abu Ghraib, Mark Danner closes his essay "The Logic of Torture" by looking at what comes next, after the first responses.

Over the next weeks and months, Americans will decide how to confront what their fellow citizens did at Abu Ghraib, and what they go on doing at Bagram and Guantanamo and other secret prisons. By their actions they will decide whether they will begin to close the growing difference between what Americans say they are and what they actually do. Iraqis and others around the world will be watching to see whether all the torture will be stopped and whether those truly responsible for it, military and civilian, will be punished. This is, after all, as our President never tires of saying, a war of ideas. Now, as the photographs of Abu Ghraib make clear, it has also become a struggle over what, if anything, really does represent America.

Two years later, it's not looking much better.