Interrogating Torture.(The Talk of the Town)(coercive interrogation of prisoners)

On November 14, 2003, at Abu Ghraib prison, on the outskirts of Baghdad, six hooded Iraqi prisoners accused by their American jailers of trying to start a riot were brought to the Military Intelligence cellblock and handed over to Corporal Charles A. Graner, Jr., the military-police officer in charge of the night shift. Graner noted in the M.P. logbook that he had instructions from a lieutenant colonel to strip the newcomers, and to subject them to a routine of rough calisthenics designed to disorient, exhaust, terrify, and humiliate them, and to cause them pain. This was standard practice on the M.I. block, and Graner set to work. When one of the prisoners resisted, Graner later told Army investigators, "I bashed him against the wall." Running hooded prisoners into walls was also standard practice at Abu Ghraib, but this prisoner fell to the floor, and blood ran out from under his hood, and a medic was summoned. In the logbook, Graner wrote that the prisoner required eight stitches on his chin. He helped sew the stitches himself, and he had one of his soldiers photograph the bloodstained scene.

Graner clearly felt that he had nothing to hide. When his company commander, Captain Christopher Brinson, and one of Brinson's deputies, Master Sergeant Brian Lipinski, stopped by, Graner said, he made the other prisoners crawl to their cells while Brinson and Lipinski watched. Graner also said that, in addition to medics and his superior officers, lawyers from the Judge Advocate General's Corps frequently visited the cellblock and saw the abuse that went on there. Graner interpreted their presence to be "implied consent that this was all O.K.," he said. In fact, two days later, Brinson, who in civilian life is a top aide to Representative Mike Rogers, Republican of Alabama, a member of the House Armed Services Committee, issued a Developmental Counselling Form to Graner. Such a form is normally used for reprimands, but what Brinson wrote sounded more like a commendation: "CPL Graner, you are doing a fine job. . . . You have received many accolades. . . . Continue to perform at this level and it will help us succeed at our overall mission."

That story comes to mind as Americans are seized by belated outrage over the Bush Administration's policy of practicing torture against prisoners in the war on terror. It was exactly five years ago that some of the photographs that Charles Graner and his comrades took at Abu Ghraib were aired on CBS's "Sixty Minutes" and published in this magazine. At that time, the Administration claimed that Graner was the mastermind of the abuse represented in the photographs, and that they showed nothing more than the depravity of a group of rogue soldiers who had fallen under his sway. Yet it became almost immediately apparent--and has been confirmed repeatedly in the years since, most recently with President Obama's decision to release four Bush Administration memorandums seeking to establish a legal justification for the use of torture--that the Abu Ghraib photographs showed not individuals run amok but American policy in action. (From those memos, we now know that Bush Administration lawyers had a technical term for what Charles Graner called bashing a man against a wall. The term is "walling.")

The natural first reaction on seeing the photographs of American soldiers torturing Iraqi ...