While watching CNN the other night, a friend of mine called the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuses "torture." She proposed that the emotional scarring of being photographed nude or being threatened with electrocution was as terrible as physical torture. It wasn't the first time I had heard this said at Brown.
Abu Ghraib is a household name. Most people know the prison as the setting of the infamous photographs taken by American soldiers last year. Yet before the prison scandal, the media knew Abu Ghraib as "Saddam's torture central." Abu Ghraib was the site of thousands of deaths, of unspeakable torture and of extreme violation of human rights. Up to 40,00 prisoners were executed there in 1984 alone. In 2001, the prison is thought to have held as many as 15,000 inmates. Guards fed shredded plastic to prisoners, and there are allegations that some detainees were subjected to experiments as part of Iraq's chemical weapons plan. Equating the methods of humiliation employed by American soldiers at Abu Ghraib with torture demeans the meaning of torture.
The actions of American soldiers are inexcusable, but are not torture. A report by Gen. Antonio Taguba cites incidents of punching, slapping and kicking detainees; forcibly arranging hooded detainees in sexually explicit positions for photographing; forcing male detainees to wear women's underwear; writing "I am a rapist" on the leg of a detainee alleged to have raped a 15-year-old; taking photographs of dead Iraqi detainees with cheerful looks; and threatening detainees with pistols, rape and dogs, among other offenses. These actions represent an obvious mistreatment of prisoners, yet the actions pale in comparison to the methods of interrogation used by other countries. The media has had more of an outcry against photographing war prisoners in their underwear than it has about the innocent civilians killed in the war itself.
Torture is slashing the necks of your enemies, gouging their eyes out, burning their genitals, hanging them on the wall by their arms until they die, using pliers to remove their teeth, drilling holes in their ankles, breaking their heads with baseball bats, pouring salt into wounds and raping their wives in front of them. These are all things that happened to the Iraqi people at Abu Ghraib under Saddam's regime. Ali Kaddam Kardom states, "I was beaten, refrigerated naked and put underground for one year because I was a Shiite and Saddam is a Sunni." By equating the abuses performed by American soldiers to "torture," the media is devaluing the significance of the word.
The misconduct of American soldiers is not excusable just because worse things have been done in wartime. The prisoner abuse scandal is obviously a disgrace to American values. Yet it does not deserve the label of "torture" or the international hatred that it has spurred. Perhaps American soldiers do not deserve all the criticism that they are receiving. From our ivy tower, completely distanced from wartime realities, Abu Ghraib may symbolize American incompetence. However, for the people of Iraq, it is where tens of thousands of family members died under Saddam Hussein's rule. Remember that.
Laura Martin '06 will tell you what she thinks is important.
