Weekly Shredder 38:
The Wall Street Journal on Abu Ghraib
by James Norton

The Wall Street Journal may be the most remarkable newspaper in the world. In the media pantheon, it's Janus, the two-faced god. One face spits up an infinte string of immaculate pearls of truth, strung together by painstaking hours of honest, smart reporting and rigorous editing.

The other sprays forth a stream of ideological bile. The Journal's readers, it seems, want two things from their paper: a reporting team that sticks to the facts in order to facilitate sound business decisions, and an op-ed team that disregards the facts in order to make them feel comfy and cozy.

It's generally easy to write off the Journal's op-ed team — they chase after the predictable goals of reinforcing Republican hegemony, promoting trickle-down economics and sticking it the left. Fair enough.

But it's one thing to promote economic hackery and political profit, and another entirely to callously try to bury the investigation of human rights abuses, as the Journal did in a sickening op-ed marking the anniversary of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal.

For archives, audio, and background about the column, click here.

But before we shred the Journal's article, a little perspective. The political left is always whining about the need for human rights. Blah blah torture, blah blah children dying, blah blah African people. Even earnest leftists get a little tired of the miserable diet of guilt, horror and concern fed to us by self-righteous, over-educated, smarmy holier-than-thou pundits writing at us from their home bases in New York, San Francisco, Boston and Washington, D.C.

This column sheepishly pleads no contest, and promises to try to keep a sense of perspective.

And there's something to be said for the idea that America can't be responsible for all of the world's problems. Our time, money and people are finite. We can't fix everything.

Nor should we be expected to.

But the situation changes radically when the country — or, more accurately, its Republican government — chooses to put its troops on foreign soil.

American troops need to be (and typically are) the finest representatives of the world's leading democracy. They need to be professional. They need to be respectful. They need to be tough, but they can't shoot the crap out of civilians, or loot, or rape.

Or torture.

That's why we're the good guys. We're not the good guys because we're American. We're the good guys because we believe in human rights, because we've got a constitution that tells us we're free to speak and worship as we please, because we fight to increase the world's general level of freedom and happiness.

We set the example.

The Wall Street Journal op-ed page, however, feels that the best way to set an example is to bury this still-festering scandal as quickly as possible, without holding any of its architects responsible.

...information gleaned from dozens of courts martial and criminal investigations have cleared most senior civilian and military leaders of wrongdoing in the Abu Ghraib scandal and other Iraq prisoner abuses.

Let's amend that. Information gleaned from dozens of classified or partially classified investigations by a Republican and/or military-dominated process has cleared most senior leaders of criminal charges. But reports — including the Taguba Report — have broadly implicated systemic problems and the commanders responsible for observing and correcting them. But let's look at the people whom the process somehow missed:

Donald Rumsfeld, who prevailed over the torture camps at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and Afghanistan, was one of the few Bush cabinet secretaries retained through the second term.

Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the former top commander in Iraq, approved the use of dogs on restrained prisoners, according to three classified reports. He has faced no discipline.

New Yorker investigative reporter Seymour Hersh, quoting the Taguba Report on prison abuse, describes Sanchez's actions as follows:

General Taguba fearlessly took issue with the Sanchez orders, which, he wrote in his report, "effectively made an [Military Intelligence] Officer, rather than [a Military Police] officer, responsible for the MP units conducting detainee operations at that facility. This is not doctrinally sound due to the different missions and agenda assigned to each of these respective specialties."

Alberto Gonzales, who crafted a memo designed to help interrogators torture without legal restraint, has been promoted to the post of attorney general.

Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, who visited Abu Ghraib to put pressure on interrogators to extract information by extraordinary and sloppy means has gone unpunished and unaccountable.

The Journal pats the Republican administration on the back for dealing with prisoner abuse quickly, writing:

But let's review the speed and seriousness with which Abu Ghraib was handled, which does the US military credit by any standard...

All right, let's. The Washington Post ran a story on Dec. 26, 2002, talking about brutal interrogations. In 2003, responding to off-the-record information, Amnesty International called for an investigation of US prisons in Iraq. It wasn't until January 2004 that the "speedy" response to the brutality began to wend its way through the system, finally supercharged by the release of the horrifying photographs conservative commentator Rush Limbaugh famously compared to a frat hazing.

The Wall Street Journal then proceeds to blame the "bad apples" for a cross-continental breakdown in procedure and discipline at US military prisons, aggravated by pressure to get information at any cost and legal memos written to erode the protection of prisoners.

Yes, there were abuses in Iraq beyond what was pictured at Abu Ghraib, but abuses happen in war and in civilian prisons too. No evidence has been produced to support allegations that the abuses were "systematic" or that they were inspired or condoned by superiors up the chain of command.

Note the passive voice. "There were abuses." "Abuses happen." Not much that can be done; abuses spontaneously generate.

Hersh, no lightweight, assesses the "chain of command question" differently:

Taguba's report, however, amounts to an unsparing study of collective wrongdoing and the failure of Army leadership at the highest levels. The picture he draws of Abu Ghraib is one in which Army regulations and the Geneva conventions were routinely violated, and in which much of the day-to-day management of the prisoners was abdicated to Army military-intelligence units and civilian contract employees.

The crowning irony of the Wall Street Journal editorial is that it runs so completely contrary to the eternal (if unwritten) conservative credo: "Responsibility, dignity, accountability."

Who's responsible for Abu Ghraib? A few low-ranking misfits. The abuses just "happen."

Who stands up for the dignity of the innocent men and women of the US military, the mostly innocent people tortured at Abu Ghraib and Afghanistan and the Constitution? Nobody.

Who's held accountable? Ultimately, no one. No one set the tone; no one encouraged the abuse in order to extract information; no one important should have to pay.

Remember "Travelgate"? Remember the Republican politicians and op-ed writers howling for investigations and Senate probes because of the firing of five officials in the White House travel office? Where are they now that American officers been implicated in torture, and America's reputation has been dragged through the mud?

It's a tough nut to crack. Sounds like a case for the Wall Street Journal's investigative reporters.

E-mail James Norton at jrnorton@flakmag.com.

— graphic by Derek Evernden (derek@ocellus.net)