Interrogating Torture
by Philip Gourevitch
On November 14, 2003, at Abu Ghraib prison, on the outskirts of Baghdad, six hooded Iraqi prisoners accused by their American jailers of trying to start a riot were brought to the Military Intelligence cellblock and handed over to Corporal Charles A. Graner, Jr., the military-police officer in charge of the night shift. Graner noted in the M.P. logbook that he had instructions from a lieutenant colonel to strip the newcomers, and to subject them to a routine of rough calisthenics designed to disorient, exhaust, terrify, and humiliate them, and to cause them pain. This was standard practice on the M.I. block, and Graner set to work. When one of the prisoners resisted, Graner later told Army investigators, “I bashed him against the wall.” Running hooded prisoners into walls was also standard practice at Abu Ghraib, but this prisoner fell to the floor, and blood ran out from under his hood, and a medic was summoned. In the logbook, Graner wrote that the prisoner required eight stitches on his chin. He helped sew the stitches himself, and he had one of his soldiers photograph the bloodstained scene.
Graner clearly felt that he had nothing to hide. When his company commander, Captain Christopher Brinson, and one of Brinson’s deputies, Master Sergeant Brian Lipinski, stopped by, Graner said, he made the other prisoners crawl to their cells while Brinson and Lipinski watched. Graner also said that, in addition to medics and his superior officers, lawyers from the Judge Advocate General’s Corps frequently visited the cellblock and saw the abuse that went on there. Graner interpreted their presence to be “implied consent that this was all O.K.,” he said. In fact, two days later, Brinson, who in civilian life is a top aide to Representative Mike Rogers, Republican of Alabama, a member of the House Armed Services Committee, issued a Developmental Counselling Form to Graner. Such a form is normally used for reprimands, but what Brinson wrote sounded more like a commendation: “CPL Graner, you are doing a fine job. . . . You have received many accolades. . . . Continue to perform at this level and it will help us succeed at our overall mission.”
That story comes to mind as Americans are seized by belated outrage over the Bush Administration’s policy of practicing torture against prisoners in the war on terror. It was exactly five years ago that some of the photographs that Charles Graner and his comrades took at Abu Ghraib were aired on CBS’s “Sixty Minutes” and published in this magazine. At that time, the Administration claimed that Graner was the mastermind of the abuse represented in the photographs, and that they showed nothing more than the depravity of a group of rogue soldiers who had fallen under his sway. Yet it became almost immediately apparent—and has been confirmed repeatedly in the years since, most recently with President Obama’s decision to release four Bush Administration memorandums seeking to establish a legal justification for the use of torture—that the Abu Ghraib photographs showed not individuals run amok but American policy in action. (From those memos, we now know that Bush Administration lawyers had a technical term for what Charles Graner called bashing a man against a wall. The term is “walling.”)
The natural first reaction on seeing the photographs of American soldiers torturing Iraqi prisoners in Saddam Hussein’s old dungeons was to ask: Why are we doing such things to them? With time, however, Americans have come increasingly to understand that it is equally appropriate to ask: Why are we doing such things to ourselves? Why dismantle the laws that have made our country worth fighting and dying for against states that torture? Former Vice-President Dick Cheney has said that we must torture because it is effective. That is, at best, a false argument: a crime is not absolved just because it works. (After all, terrorism can be effective.) President Obama, in his press conference last week, cut through the noise to the essence of the issue. Torture, he said, “corrodes the character of a country.”
America is now embroiled in a debate about how, or whether, to hold the true masterminds—the former President, the former Vice-President, the former Defense Secretary, and their top lawyers—to account for their criminal policies. Here, we are on uncharted ground. As a rule, the war-crimes prosecutions of the past century were conducted by a group of states, acting collectively, against the (usually defeated) leaders of another state. When states hold their own leaders to account, it tends to happen not after an election but after a revolution, when the very premise of the ancien régime is treated as criminal. Furthermore, prosecution and punishment are not necessarily the best means to eradicate the rot from a political system, because in adjudicating systemic crimes political compromise is inevitable. It is practically impossible, and politically intolerable, to contemplate holding to account every corrupted officer in the chains of command that ran between the White House and the guardhouse at Abu Ghraib or at Bagram Airbase. A full and public reckoning of the historical record might be less cathartic but would ultimately be more valuable than a few sensational trials.
In any event, President Obama, who has taken a courageous lead in bringing the issue of torture to light, and in insisting on recriminalizing it, appears to have no interest in taking any of the policymakers to court—though he has not precluded doing so. Still, to date the only Americans who have been prosecuted and sentenced to imprisonment for the criminal policies that emanated from the highest levels are ten low-ranking servicemen and women—those who took and appeared in the Abu Ghraib photographs, and embarrassed the nation by showing us what we were doing there. Charles Graner is the only one remaining in prison, serving ten years. His superior officers enjoy their freedom, and C.I.A. interrogators, who spent years committing far worse acts against prisoners than Graner did even in the darkest days at Abu Ghraib, have been assured immunity.
But, if full justice remains impossible, surely some injustices can be corrected. Whenever crimes of state are adjudicated—at Nuremberg or The Hague, Phnom Penh or Kigali—the principle of command responsibility, whereby the leaders who give the orders are held to a higher standard of accountability than the foot soldiers who follow, pertains. There can be no restoration of the national honor if we continue to scapegoat those who took the fall for an Administration—and for us all. ♦
