Operation Enduring Shame

Tim Golden has a truly horrifying torture story in todays New York Times. The opening sentence sets the sickening tone:

Even as the young Afghan man was dying before them, his American jailers continued to torment him.

The agonizing tortures inflicted on him as he was dying are reminiscent of the torture and crucifixion of Christ - including the crucifixion like position he was chained in and the sadistic guard who, when he asked for water, cut a hole in the bottom of the water bottle and sprayed him without letting him drink. A final cruelty lay in the fact that his captors mostly believed him to be totally innocent.

I have rarely been so ashamed of my country and my army. After a long cover-up, the low ranking enlisted perpetrators are being prosecuted, but as usual, none of the senior officers are being pursued. After World War II we hung Japanese soldiers for these types of crimes, and their colonels, and generals, and minister of defense.

The story makes clear that this was not something that senior officers just overlooked.

Some of the mistreatment was quite obvious, the file suggests. Senior officers frequently toured the detention center, and several of them acknowledged seeing prisoners chained up for punishment or to deprive them of sleep. Shortly before the two deaths, observers from the International Committee of the Red Cross specifically complained to the military authorities at Bagram about the shackling of prisoners in "fixed positions," documents show.

Even though military investigators learned soon after Mr. Dilawar's death that he had been abused by at least two interrogators, the Army's criminal inquiry moved slowly. Meanwhile, many of the Bagram interrogators, led by the same operations officer, Capt. Carolyn A. Wood, were redeployed to Iraq and in July 2003 took charge of interrogations at the Abu Ghraib prison. According to a high-level Army inquiry last year, Captain Wood applied techniques there that were "remarkably similar" to those used at Bagram.

My first reaction was horror and disgust, but my next was rage, rage at the contemptible careerist generals who brought this shame on our army and nation by tolerating, encouraging, and covering up, and rage at the political operators who created the climate for these crimes. They have shamed their nation and themselves, made the world more dangerous for Americans, and, very likely, ensured that we will not win these wars soon or perhaps at all. My final reaction was fear - I have a child in an Islamic country, and now more than ever Americans will be targets.

The many conservatives who have rushed forth to distort, justify, minimize and rationalize these horrors are beneath contempt.