Financial Times Editorial - Abu Ghraib again

Abu Ghraib again
Published: February 17 2006 02:00 | Last updated: February 17 2006 02:00 Copyright by the Financial Times

The images are chilling and depraved: Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib subjected to torture and sexual humiliation and, in some cases and circumstances that are not explained, death. These may be old pictures dating from 2003 and the first Abu Ghraib scandal. But they are a crippling new blow to the reputation of the US and its allies in Iraq.

They remind us of the shame of that episode. They are worse than the indelible images that so shocked us then. Furthermore, in the interim, the Pentagon has for all practical purposes tried to suppress them. The jihadi fanatics trying to trigger a clash of civilisations between Islam and the west must feel they are lucky in their enemies.

This second Abu Ghraib episode comes days after an appalling video, apparently shot by a gloating soldier, of British troops beating senseless rioting teenagers in southern Iraq. If that were not enough, a United Nations report has called on the US to close its extraterritorial and extralegal detention centre in Guantánamo Bay, and refrain from "any practice amounting to torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment".

As they have in the past, the Bush administration's spokesmen and apologists have come out with more variants of: "Ah yes, but look what we're up against", and how Saddam Hussein's regime was guilty of so much worse.

This defensive moral comparison misses the point, unless those making it wish - as many Iraqis and Arabs are doing - to compare the world's leading democracy to one of the vilest tyrants of modern times. The point is this.

Abu Ghraib should never have happened. But when it did, it should have been dealt with rigorously. But there was no independent investigation and no real accountability: the two most visible privates in the photos were jailed and a junior general was demoted. But responsibility lay - and lies - further up the chain of command, as far as Donald Rumsfeld, defence secretary, and officials such as Alberto Gonzales, now attorney-general, who devised a framework for circumventing the Geneva Conventions. It is they who should be held to account.

The same applies in the British brutality case. It is not enough to cashier a few squaddies. Under whose command were they behaving in this sickening way, and is such treatment a pattern?

There are three broader points. The Bush administration - whether on wiretapping without warrant, the mistreatment of prisoners or Dick Cheney's quail-hunting misadventure - likes to operate in secrecy. This departs so far from US traditions of open government and accountability that it neither works nor, often, is it legal. And lawlessness gives real aid and succour to the enemy.

Second, one of the many failures of the US in Iraq has been to try to run an occupation through the unrestrained use of power. In the first fateful year after the invasion, before the insurgency got properly under way, occupation forces seized 43,000 prisoners, of whom only 600 were referred to a court. As senior American officers recently complained, this policy has made Abu Ghraib a university of jihad.

Third, as the International Crisis Group, the think-tank on conflict, pointed out in a seminal report on the Iraqi insurgency this week, the US and its allies may not be able to establish a monopoly over the use of force in Iraq but they "can and should do so over the legitimate use of force". They will not do so allowing the brutalisation of Iraqis to go unpunished.