Skeletons in the Closet
by J. Daniel Janzen

While Congress and the Bush administration heatedly debate the finer points of the 9/11 Commission Report, some of its recommendations have gone undiscussed. One such proposal, found under the heading "Prevent the Continued Growth of Islamic Terrorism," is that the United States "should offer an example of moral leadership in the world." As one who had to be talked out of using such terms as "crusade" and "infinite justice," President Bush can surely get behind this idea. That's the whole reason we went to Iraq — to rally the faithful and bringing righteous action against the evil and corrupt.

Alas, every crusade has its excesses. Since the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse story broke, the administration and the Pentagon have remained determined to paint it as the actions of a few bad apples. When a report by Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba suggested that something more "systemic" might lie behind the outbreak of similar crimes by multiple offenders, the Army went out and found a more sympathetic auditor, Lt. Gen. Paul Mikolashek, its own inspector general, and commissioned another report. Gen. Mikolashek's report, buried deep in coverage of the Sept. 11 report coincidentally issued the same day, unsurprisingly attributes the alleged atrocities to "unauthorized actions taken by a few individuals." Meanwhile, amid hair-splitting arguments about whether exploring the legality of torture is equivalent to contemplating its use, or how bad it really is to pretend to drown someone, the public seems to have lost interest in the matter.

We might not want to declare Abu Ghraib over just yet, though. Pfc. Lynndie England herself, the grinning gamine whose name has become synonymous with Arab humiliation, told CBS News that there was worse abuse going on in the prison than what we've seen so far. She declined to elaborate, but in a recent speech to the ACLU, Seymour Hersh of The New Yorker filled in a few blanks.

The women [at Abu Ghraib] were passing messages out saying please come and kill me because of what's happened. And basically what happened is that those women who were arrested with young boys, children, in cases that have been [video] recorded, the boys were sodomized, with the cameras rolling, and the worst above all of them is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking. That your government has, and they're in total terror it's going to come out.

Granted, this is largely hearsay; Hersh doesn't claim to have seen such footage himself. On the other hand, three GIs have been charged with manslaughter for forcing two detainees to jump into the Tigris River, one to his death, with the full knowledge of their sergeant and fellow troop members. Even Gen. Mikolashek couldn't help but find 20 deaths. Whether it's rape or only murder that the U.S. military has been committing in our name, it hardly clarifies our moral contrast with kidnappers and decapitators.

Meanwhile, the rest of the international community is more likely to heed the presumably unbiased report of the International Red Cross, which found in February that "methods of ill treatment" had been "used in a systematic way" by U.S. troops in Iraq. The Red Cross also estimated that nearly 90 percent of the abuses had nothing to do with the insurgency or any other kind of anti-American activity.

As new information continues to come to light, Sen. John Warner, R-Va., has held a series of hearings in which he has interviewed Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his Undersecretary for Intelligence Stephen Cambone, among others. Warner wanted to squeeze in another hearing before the all-important recess, this one to feature former occupation administrator L. Paul Bremer, but decided instead to wait until after the Pentagon had finished its own seven investigations. At this point, it's hard to imagine Rumsfeld's team wrapping things up any earlier than, say, mid-November.

Thirty-seven years ago, another group of GIs were found to have massacred several hundred unarmed Vietnamese men, women and children over the course of five months. Although a four-and-a-half-year investigation of the celebrated Tiger Force found evidence of war crimes including murder and assault, no one was ever charged in court and not a word was breathed about it to the American public. The Toledo Blade won the Pulitzer Prize for digging up the story last October, but it has failed to attract broad attention, possibly because no lurid photographs have been provided. After initially announcing the opening of an "active review" of the Tiger Force case, the Army has since stonewalled the Blade on its status. With poetic injustice, the current excuse is that they are too busy responding to Abu Ghraib accusations.

Tiger Force and Abu Ghraib have more in common than just the lack of accountability. The Toledo Blade has pointed out that the Tiger Force case "was killed the same month in 1975 that Mr. Rumsfeld began his first stint as secretary of defense. Mr. Rumsfeld has said he does not remember the case despite it being the longest war-crimes investigation of Vietnam." Rest assured, he's looking forward to forgetting all about Abu Ghraib as well.

Moral leadership brings many things to mind. Integrity. Courage. The willingness to admit fault. The 9/11 Commission Report defines it as to be "committed to treat people humanely, abide by the rule of law, and be generous and caring to our neighbors." In this way, we can offer Muslim parents "a vision that might give their children a better future." It's a nice thought, but Muslim parents won't be inclined to trust us around their children for a while yet. As Seymour Hersh reports, "They see us as a sexually perverse society. The sexual stuff we did to them is seen as just perversion. And I think we're going to have consequences for a long time to come."

E-mail J. Daniel Janzen at jdaniel at flakmag dot com.