Abu Ghraib - something is broken in America The WE News Archives

It's been over a year since I published a series of articles in the New Yorker outlining the abuses at Abu Ghraib.

There have been at least 10 official military investigations since then - none of which has challenged the official Bush administration line that there was no high-level policy condoning or overlooking such abuse.

The buck always stops with the handful of enlisted army reservists from the 372nd Military Police Company whose images fill the iconic Abu Ghraib photos with their inappropriate smiles and sadistic posing of the prisoners.

It's a dreary pattern.

The reports and the subsequent Senate proceedings are sometimes criticized on editorial pages.

There are calls for a truly independent investigation by the Senate or House.

Then, as months pass with no official action, the issue withers away, until the next set of revelations revives it.

Young special forces officer

There is much more to be learned.

What do I know?

A few things stand out.

I know of the continuing practice of American operatives seizing suspected terrorists and taking them, without any meaningful legal review, to interrogation centers in south-east Asia and elsewhere.

I know of the young special forces officer whose subordinates were confronted with charges of prisoner abuse and torture at a secret hearing after one of them emailed explicit photos back home.

The officer testified that, yes, his men had done what the photos depicted, but they - and everybody in the command - understood such treatment was condoned by higher-ups.

800-900 Pakistani boys 13-15

What else do I know?

I know that the decision was made inside the Pentagon in the first weeks of the Afghanistan war - which seemed "won" by December 2001 - to indefinitely detain scores of prisoners who were accumulating daily at American staging posts throughout the country.

At the time, according to a memo, in my possession, addressed to Donald Rumsfeld, there were "800-900 Pakistani boys 13-15 years of age in custody".

I could not learn if some or all of them have been released, or if some are still being held.

A Pentagon spokesman, when asked to comment, said that he had no information to substantiate the number in the document, and that there were currently about 100 juveniles being held in Iraq and Afghanistan; he did not address detainees held elsewhere.

He said they received some special care, but added "age is not a determining factor in detention ... As with all the detainees, their release is contingent upon the determination that they are not a threat and that they are of no further intelligence value. Unfortunately, we have found that ... age does not necessarily diminish threat potential."

What did the president do?

The 10 official inquiries into Abu Ghraib are asking the wrong questions, at least in terms of apportioning ultimate responsibility for the treatment of prisoners.

The question that never gets adequately answered is this: what did the president do after being told about Abu Ghraib? It is here that chronology becomes very important.

The US-led coalition forces swept to seeming immediate success in the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, and by early April Baghdad had been taken.

Over the next few months, however, the resistance grew in scope, persistence and skill.

In August 2003 it became more aggressive.

At this point there was a decision to get tough with the thousands of prisoners in Iraq, many of whom had been seized in random raids or at roadside checkpoints.

Major General Geoffrey D Miller, an army artillery officer who, as commander at Guantánamo, had got tough with the prisoners there, visited Baghdad to tutor the troops - to "Gitmo-ize" the Iraqi system.

Begun abuse of prisoners

By the beginning of October 2003 the reservists on the night shift at Abu Ghraib had begun their abuse of prisoners.

They were aware that some of America's elite special forces units were also at work at the prison.

Those highly trained military men had been authorized by the Pentagon's senior leadership to act far outside the normal rules of engagement.

There was no secret about the interrogation practices used throughout that autumn and early winter, and few objections.

Condoleezza Rice praised efforts

In fact representatives of one of the Pentagon's private contractors at Abu Ghraib, who were involved in prisoner interrogation, were told that Condoleezza Rice, then the president's national security adviser, had praised their efforts.

It's not clear why she would do so - there is still no evidence that the American intelligence community has accumulated any significant information about the operations of the resistance, who continue to strike US soldiers and Iraqis.

The night shift's activities at Abu Ghraib came to an end on January 13 2004, when specialist Joseph M Darby, one of the 372nd reservists, provided army police authorities with a disk full of explicit images. By then, these horrors had been taking place for nearly four months.

Three days later the army began an investigation.

But it is what was not done that is significant.

Bush asked hard questions?

There is no evidence that President Bush, upon learning of the devastating conduct at Abu Ghraib, asked any hard questions of Rumsfeld and his own aides in the White House; no evidence that they took any significant steps, upon learning in mid-January of the abuses, to review and modify the military's policy toward prisoners.

I was told by a high-level former intelligence official that within days of the first reports the judicial system was programmed to begin prosecuting the enlisted men and women in the photos and to go no further up the chain of command.

In late April, after the CBS and New Yorker reports, a series of news conferences and press briefings emphasized the White House's dismay over the conduct of a few misguided soldiers at Abu Ghraib and the president's repeated opposition to torture.

Miller was introduced anew to the American press corps in Baghdad and it was explained that the general had been assigned to clean up the prison system and instill respect for the Geneva conventions.

Stephen Cambone

Despite Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo - not to mention Iraq and the failure of intelligence - and the various roles they played in what went wrong, Rumsfeld kept his job; Rice was promoted to secretary of state; Alberto Gonzales, who commissioned the memos justifying torture, became attorney general; deputy secretary of defense Paul Wolfowitz was nominated to the presidency of the World Bank; and Stephen Cambone, under-secretary of defense for intelligence and one of those most directly involved in the policies on prisoners, was still one of Rumsfeld's closest confidants.

President Bush, asked about accountability, told the Washington Post before his second inauguration that the American people had supplied all the accountability needed - by re-electing him.

Only seven enlisted men and women have been charged or pleaded guilty to offenses relating to Abu Ghraib.

No officer is facing criminal proceedings.

Such action, or inaction, has special significance for me.

In my years of reporting, since covering My Lai in 1969, I have come to know the human costs of such events - and to believe that soldiers who participate can become victims as well.

Came back different person

Amid my frenetic reporting for the New Yorker on Abu Ghraib, I was telephoned by a middle-aged woman.

She told me that a family member, a young woman, was among those members of the 320th Military Police Battalion, to which the 372nd was attached, who had returned to the US in March.

She came back a different person - distraught, angry and wanting nothing to do with her immediate family.

At some point afterward, the older woman remembered that she had lent the reservist a portable computer with a DVD player to take to Iraq; on it she discovered an extensive series of images of a naked Iraqi prisoner flinching in fear before two snarling dogs. One of the images was published in the New Yorker and then all over the world.

The war, the older woman told me, was not the war for democracy and freedom that she thought her young family member had been sent to fight.

Others must know, she said.

There was one other thing she wanted to share with me.

Since returning from Iraq, the young woman had been getting large black tattoos all over her body.

She seemed intent on changing her skin.

Extracted from The Chain of Command, published in paperback by Penguin Press.

IN SALINAS, Calif., word went out. This is how many tribal stories begin: Word goes out to the people of a community that there is a great danger or wrong being committed.

This is how I first found out that Salinas was going to be the first city in America to close its libraries because of budget cuts.

Without getting into any mudslinging about whether or not our leaders are clueless, bullying, nonreading numbskulls, let me just say that when word went out that the city's three libraries were scheduled for closure -- the John Steinbeck, the Cesar Chavez, and the El Galiban --a whole lot of people rose up as one to say this does not work for us.

Salinas is one of the poorest communities in the state, within one of the richest counties in the country, the locale of so many of Steinbeck's great novels: Think farm workers, fields of artichokes, garlic, faded stucco houses stained with dirt, ticky-tacky housing tracts, John Ford, James Dean's face in ''East of Eden," strawberry fields, and old gas stations.

Now think about closing the libraries there, closing the buildings that hold the town's books, all those bound stories about people and wisdom and justice and life and silliness and laborers bending low to pick the strawberries.

You'd have to be crazy to bring such obvious karmic repercussions down on yourself. So in early April, a group of writers and actors fought back, showing up in Salinas for a 24-hour "emergency read-in."

My sad '60s heart soared like an eagle at the very name: an emergency read-in. George W. Bush and John Ashcroft tried for three years to create a country that the East Germans could only dream about, empowering the government to keep track of the books we checked out or bought, all in the name of national security. But they hadn't counted on how passionately we writers feel about saving the world, or at any rate, the worlds contained in the skinny, silent spines of books.

We came together because we started out as children who were saved by stories, stories read to us at night when we were little, stories we read by ourselves, in which we could get lost, and thereby, found.

Some of us had grown to become people with loud voices, which the farm workers and their children of this community all of a sudden needed. And we were mad. Show a bunch of writers a sealed library, and they see red. Perhaps they are a little sensitive, or overwrought, but they see a one-way tunnel into the dark. They see the beginnings of fascism.

A free public library is a revolutionary notion, and when people don't have free access to books, then communities are like radios without batteries.

The entire flow of communication is bricked off.

You cut people off from incredible sources of information -- mythical, practical, linguistic, or political -- and you break them.

You render them helpless in the face of political oppression. We were not going to let this happen.

Writers and actors came from all around. San Francisco is two hours and San Jose an hour north. Hector Elizondo drove up from Los Angeles, as did Mike Farrell. Poet Jose Montoya drove from Sacramento, four hours away, Alicia Rodriguez-Valdez flew all morning to be there. I drove down from the Bay Area with the Buddhist writer and teacher Jack Kornfield.

When we arrived, the lawn outside the library held only about a 150 people instead of the throngs we had hoped for, but the people of the community were so welcoming and grateful, and the women of CodePink, who helped organize the reading event, kept everyone's spirits up.

It's hard to stay depressed when activists in pink feather boas are kissing you.

Many people had pitched tents on one side of the library, where they could rest throughout the night while the readings went on at the stage.

Can you imagine the kind of person who is willing to stay up all night in the cold to keep a few condemned libraries open?

Well, not me, baby. I was going home to my own bed that night. But then I saw some of my parents' old friends who were planning to stay, who have been protesting and rallying in civil rights and peace marches since I was a girl, who had driven from San Francisco because they've always known that the only thing that keeps a democracy functioning is for its citizens to stay educated.

If you don't have a place where the poor, marginalized, and young can find out who they are, then you have no hope of maintaining a free and civilized society.

We were there to celebrate intelligence capabilities that our country can actually be proud of -- those of librarians.

But those of us gathered that day see them as healers and magicians. They can tease out of an often inarticulate person enough information about what he or she is after, and then lead him or her on the path of connection. They're trail guides through the forest of shelves and aisles -- you turn a person loose who has limited skills, and they are going to get walloped by the branches. But librarians match up readers with the right books: "Hey, is this one too complicated? Then why don't you give this one a try?"

Inside the library were Hispanic children and teenagers and their parents, and a few old souls.

They sat in chairs, reading, stood perusing the bilingual collection of books, and worked at the computers.

These computers are the only ones that a lot of people in town have access to.

The after-school literacy and homework programs are two of the few safe places to which parents can direct their children, away from the gangs.

On this afternoon, parents read to their children in whispered Spanish, and the air felt nutritious: Barry Lopez said, "Sometimes a person needs a story more than food."

I went back outside. Poets of every color read. People milled around with antiwar slogans -- ''Bomba-No! Libres-Si!"

Older members of the community told stories from legends, history, their own families.

Fernando Suarez del Solar pays respects at the cross representing his son, who was killed in Iraq in 2004, at the Arlington West memorial in Santa Monica, Calif., Monday, May 30, 2005.

Each cross in the memorial, erected by Veterans for Peace, represents a U.S. casualty killed in Iraq.

Fernando Suarez stepped up to the mike, and spoke of his son, who had died recently in Iraq at 19. He spoke first in English and then in Spanish, as he does frequently around the country, and your heart could hardly beat for the sadness.

Maybe in Oaxaca, Mexico, children are still hearing the stories that the elders and comedians tell, but these kids in Salinas are being raised by televisions.

So many of their parents work in the fields and in wealthy homes. But if you don't get to hear or read stories about our world, then you can be fooled into thinking that the world isn't miraculous -- and it is. The organizers raised enough money that day, and in the weeks after, to keep the libraries open for a whole year.

Maybe you would not exactly call this a miracle, but if you had been there, maybe you would see that it was at least the beginning of one.

A bunch of normally self-obsessed artist types came together to say to the people of Salinas: We care about your children, your stories, and your freedom.

Something is broken in this country and inside you need to be fixed, and we care about that.

Reading and books are medicine.

Stories are written and told by and for people who have been broken, but who have risen up, or will, if attention is paid.

Those people are you and us.

Stories and truth are splints for the soul, and that makes today a sacred gathering.

Now, we were all saying: Pass it on.