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The Roots of Abu Ghraib
June 9, 2004, The New York Times editorial
In response to the outrages at Abu Ghraib, the Bush administration has repeatedly assured
Americans that the president and his top officials did not say or do anything that could
possibly be seen as approving the abuse or outright torture of prisoners. But disturbing
disclosures keep coming. This week it's a legal argument by government lawyers who said
the president was not bound by laws or treaties prohibiting torture.
Each new revelation makes it more clear that the inhumanity at Abu Ghraib grew out of a
morally dubious culture of legal expediency and a disregard for normal behavior fostered
at the top of this administration. It is part of the price the nation must pay for
President Bush's decision to take the extraordinary mandate to fight terrorism that he was
granted by a grieving nation after 9/11 and apply it without justification to Iraq.
Since the Abu Ghraib scandal broke into public view, the administration has contended that
a few sadistic guards acted on their own to commit the crimes we've all seen in pictures
and videos. At times, the White House has denied that any senior official was aware of the
situation, as it did with Red Cross reports documenting a pattern of prisoner abuse in
Iraq. In response to a rising pile of documents proving otherwise, the administration has
mounted a "Wizard of Oz" defense, urging Americans not to pay attention to
inconvenient evidence.
This week, The Wall Street Journal broke the story of a classified legal brief prepared
for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in March 2003 after Guantánamo Bay interrogators
complained that they were not getting enough information from terror suspects. The brief
cynically suggested that because the president is protecting national security, any ban on
torture, even an American law, could not be applied to "interrogation undertaken
pursuant to his commander-in-chief authority." Neil A. Lewis and Eric Schmitt
reported yesterday in The Times that the document had grown out of a January 2002 Justice
Department memo explaining why the Geneva Conventions and American laws against torture
did not apply to suspected terrorists.
In the wake of that memo, the White House general counsel advised Mr. Bush that Al Qaeda
and the Taliban should be considered outside the Geneva Conventions. But yesterday,
Attorney General John Ashcroft assured the Senate Judiciary Committee that Mr. Bush had
not ordered torture. These explanations might be more comforting if the administration's
definition of what's legal was not so slippery, and if the Pentagon, the Justice
Department and the White House were willing to release documents to back up their
explanation. Mr. Rumsfeld is still withholding from the Senate his orders on interrogation
techniques, among other things.
The Pentagon has said that Mr. Rumsfeld's famous declaration that the Geneva Conventions
did not apply in Afghanistan was not a sanction of illegal interrogations, and that
everyone knew different rules applied in Iraq. But Mr. Rumsfeld, his top deputies and the
highest-ranking generals could not explain to the Senate what the rules were, or even who
was in charge of the prisons in Iraq. We do not know how high up in the chain of command
the specific sanction for abusing prisoners was given, and we may never know, because the
Army is investigating itself and the Pentagon is stonewalling the Senate Armed Services
Committee. It may yet be necessary for Congress to form an investigative panel with
subpoena powers to find the answers.
What we have seen, topped by that legalistic treatise on torture, shows clearly that Mr.
Bush set the tone for this dreadful situation by pasting a false "war on
terrorism" label on the invasion of Iraq.
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