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The Scapegoat
... The occupation authorities have so far grabbed a cumulative total of some 50,000 Iraqis, 70-to-90 percent of whom have committed no crime. War supporters in this country wax indignant over reports that some of the released detainees have joined the Iraqi resistance – but who can blame them if they were subjected to a program of systematized abuse?

The Schlesinger report, the Taguba report, and the testimony at the trial of Graner and his fellow Abu Ghraib prison guards all point to the complicity of higher-ups. The only question is how far up the totem pole it goes. If Joe Ryan is to be believed, it goes all the way up to Condi Rice herself. Will anyone dare ask our presumptive secretary of state about it at her upcoming confirmation hearings – or are the Democrats more beaten down and helpless in the face of their tormentors than the inmates at Abu Ghraib?

Andrew Sullivan opines that the horrors of Abu Ghraib undermined the war: what he doesn't understand is that this is the war. Not the war he wished for – an antiseptic fantasy in which the grateful Iraqis thronged the streets hailing us as their "liberators" – but the war we have and will continue to have so long as Sullivan and others in the War Party demand that we "stay the course." Abu Ghraib had to happen, given the nature of the conflict: a struggle pitting the Iraqis – the overwhelming majority of whom want us out – against their occupiers. It wasn't the implementation of the war plan, or the lack of a war plan – it was the war itself that gave rise to Abu Ghraib and the scandal of widespread torture from Guantanamo to Afghanistan.

A population that resists "liberation" by a foreign army of occupation must be systematically terrorized – there is no other way to exercise control except by continually reminding them who's boss. Torture is a necessary corollary of occupation: it doesn't matter that most of the Iraqis rounded up are innocent. The idea is to strike terror in the hearts of potential resistance fighters and deter them from fighting back.

The idea behind the Abu Ghraib abuse, according to Seymour Hersh, was to let out those detainees who were broken and blackmail them with photos of their humiliation: they would then turn into willing informants who would be able to gather intelligence on the insurgency. Abu Ghraib wasn't an aberration: it was a policy. It wasn't an isolated incident, as subsequent investigations show: it was a tactic consciously applied by top Pentagon officials, with the full knowledge and consent of Condi Rice and others in the White House. Was it a coincidence that the U.S. military was presiding over a sadistic orgy of violence and sexual humiliation just as Justice Department lawyers were writing memos redefining torture to mean the infliction of life-threatening injuries and claiming that the president and his minions are immune from prosecution for war crimes?

I don't think so.

Graner, Lynndie England, and the others already convicted, as well as those slated to go on trial shortly, are but pawns in a game: the war-hawks in the Pentagon, who unleashed their army of torturers on the "liberated" peoples of Iraq, have so far escaped blame, and the whole mess is being swept under the rug. As George W. Bush proclaims the glories of his "global democratic revolution" and cites the upcoming elections in Iraq as evidence of America's commitment to liberty, the War Party is desperate to hide the real face of the American Imperium: the horror of Abu Ghraib....