Abu Graib:  Much Worse than a Few "Bad Apples."  GlobeandMail. com  Saturday, March 12, 2005.  Page D10

by Wesley Wark

The Torture Papers:  The Road to Abu Ghraib  Edited by Karen J. Greenberg and Joshua L. Dratel  Cambridge University Press,  1,249 pages, $67.95

Abu Ghraib: The Politics of Torture By Mark Danner  North Atlantic Books,  143 pages, $13.95

The shocking story of Abu Ghraib, and the spiralling tales of systematic torture by U.S. forces of detainees in Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere will soon reach its first anniversary. That nearly a year has passed since the story first emerged seems in itself shocking. But this is a testament to one hard fact about the torture tales: They will leave a permanent mark on the reputation of the United States and on its conduct of the war on terror. Neither the passage of time, nor the trial of low-level military policemen will wash off that blood.

The Torture Papers, 1,249 pages detailing man's inhumanity to man and the emptying out of cherished provisions of international law, is a block of granite on the path of any forgetfulness. The book is a true public service, compiled by two U.S. lawyers, which brings the whole twisted story into the public domain, and let us hope into every library and many personal hands. It begins at the beginning, with the first whispers into President George W. Bush's ear by his claque of legal counsels, arguing that the United States could choose to ignore the Geneva conventions on the treatment of prisoners of war by declaring Taliban and al-Qaeda detainees to be exempt. It pauses to note the ultimately ineffectual protest by then secretary of state Colin Powell against such a move.

The Torture Papers then sweeps on, document by document, to take us on a journey that ends inside the hellish precincts of Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, complete with descriptions of the physical and psychological abuse of prisoners that occurred there. This volume contains all the key official investigations, starting with the International Red Cross's report of February, 2004, which first opened up this can of filth. The Red Cross did not pull its punches, and was obviously shocked by what it found. The conclusions of its report state clearly that serious violations of international humanitarian law occurred at Abu Ghraib, compounded by a finding that U.S. authorities were failing to notify the families of detainees about their whereabouts, effectively resulting in their status as "disappeared" persons.

Following the Red Cross report, the U.S. military high command suddenly awoke to the problem. In March, 2004, Major-General Antonio Taguba investigated the activities of the 800th Military Police Brigade that operated the Abu Ghraib prison. Taguba confirmed what the Red Cross already knew. He found Abu Ghraib a virtually lawless environment, overcrowded, under-policed, with an MP force ill-trained for the tasks and literally abandoned by their senior officers, one of whom, General Janis Karpinski, had an emotional breakdown when interviewed by Taguba.

The Taguba report gave credence to the picture, officially sanctioned by Washington, of a renegade operation in which a handful of "bad apples" (or more colloquially, as one military source put it, "Appalachian hillbillies") betrayed American values and took matters into their own sadistic hands. The story is tempting, of course. It helps explains those unforgettable digital photographs, those war souvenirs snapped by the fun-loving guards of Abu Ghraib.

But the story doesn't hold. The Torture Papers lets the documents explain why, unvarnished by commentary. What went on in the so-called "hard site" at Abu Ghraib was an expression of an officially sanctioned policy that began in the fall of 2001 with the decision to throw away the Geneva conventions. It gathered force as the insurgency in Iraq inflicted mounting casualties and mounting dread on U.S. soldiers and their commanders in Iraq. U.S. commanders and their intelligence officers looked increasingly to the prison population of Abu Ghraib and other detention facilities as a source for intelligence, any intelligence, that might give them a handle on the Iraqi insurgency. Torture at Abu Ghraib was born of desperation, cloaked as necessity.

One year after the first public revelations about Abu Ghraib, we know what happened and how it happened, and the legal trail that led to the iron gates of the prison. Few of us will ever have a chance, or the stomach, to digest fully the official investigations into torture and prisoner abuse that fill the pages of The Torture Papers. But we have been lucky in some of our guides. The best of these, in my opinion, has been Mark Danner. His essays, which originally appeared in The New York Review of Books in May, 2004, have been reprinted in a mercifully small book, Abu Ghraib: The Politics of Torture.

Danner had the wit and the courage to see, early, what Abu Ghraib really amounted to. It wasn't a story about bad apples; it was rather a story of fateful political decisions and the bloody appetites that war generates and has always generated through the ages. Danner is thoroughly critical of the Bush administration's policies and fearful that American society will not be sufficiently aroused by the story to demand change. On both accounts, I find him right.

But even Danner misses some of the terrible irony of Abu Ghraib -- and some of the underlying context. The United States cast its military net over Iraq as part of its proclaimed war on terror. It did so based on rotten intelligence, which fitted hand-in-glove with political preconceptions about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein.

If rotten intelligence smoothed the path to Baghdad, rotten intelligence also paved the road to Abu Ghraib. Only an occupying power blind to the symbolic landscape of Iraq would have let one of Saddam Hussein's leading torture chambers be turned into a military detention facility in the first place. It should have been razed to the ground (a post-scandal promise by the Bush administration now conveniently forgotten). Only an occupying power blind to the lessons of history would have assumed that torture was a useful instrument in counter-insurgency. Only a occupying power clueless about the real roots of the violence and insurgency preying on it would have turned to the hapless inmates of Abu Ghraib for what is euphemistically known as "actionable intelligence." The vast majority of the prisoners at Abu Ghraib, it now appears, were innocents caught up in the increasingly random and panicky sweeps by U.S. forces. They knew nothing.

The story of Abu Ghraib points toward many uncomfortable truths. The U.S. government has made a terrible mistake in forgoing the Geneva conventions, an error that it may never repair, even if it wished to. The U.S. army in Iraq is wrestling with an insurgency it knows too little about. Ignorance may eventually spell defeat, if it is not overcome, and it will never be overcome by the tactics of prisoner abuse. The United States is struggling in Iraq without the comforts of a "just war" tradition that has sustained quasi-civilized conduct in battle since St. Augustine put pen to paper.

It may even be that the United States, finding itself in an unexpectedly degraded Iraq, without flowers certainly, but also without basic services and any degree of security, is reaching that nadir in which the constraints of fundamental respect for an occupied population, and an enemy hidden within it, are lost. With that loss goes some part of the soul of the occupying power itself.

Wesley Wark teaches a graduate seminar at the University of Toronto on The New Security Environment: War, Terrorism, Intelligence.