26 HOMICIDES

The last time I checked, the official number of murders by torture in U.S. custody was five, with 23 other deaths under investigation. Now we have 26 criminal homicides of detainees. There will be more to come. The standard conservative defense is that this was restricted to one night in Abu Ghraib and that even that wasn’t torture. Anyone who has read even the white-wash reports, like the Church report, knows that what happened at AG was torture under any definition. Anyone who reads the NYT this morning will note that only one of the murders took place at Abu Ghraib. This was systemic mistreatment of detainees. It still is. And this doesn’t even deal with the CIA, which has been given carte blanche to torture or kidnap anyone it suspects of terrorism, even if innocent, or to send them to Syria, Egypt or Saudi Arabia to get hung from hooks in the ceiling. The second conservative response is that this has nothing to do with official policy and that therefore no one in the administration should be held accountable. First, Donald Rumsfeld didn’t think so. He offered to resign twice because of his responsibility (he had signed two torture warrants by then and known of Abu Ghraib for months). Second, the administration’s reversal of its own 2002 memo sanctioning torture implicitly acknowledges that it had responsibility for this astonishingly widespread phenomenon of torturing prisoners to death or treating them so badly they died. The numbers of detainees tortured or mistreated who didn’t die is, of course exponentially larger. The administration included as part of its war-plan legal memos arguing that the usual ban on mistreatment of prisoners was no longer operable and that any “military necessity” could justify torture or abuse of detainees. How much more evidence do we need? Now we have the latest ACLU document dump in which one soldier reports that General Ricardo Sanchez said, “”Why are we detaining these people, we should be killing them.” Well, why should anyone be surprised when these prisoners were indeed killed? The reports so far have been very helpful. But they have been all subject to Pentagon influence. It seems to me we have to have an independent inquiry into all this. Even some conservatives have begun to question what has gone on. (No, not Glenn Reynolds. He has said he won’t link to reports of torture, since the mainstream press is doing a decent enough job. Or National Review, one of whose contributors actually wanted to join in the torture at Abu Ghraib.) On the other hand, here’s Mark Shea, a Ratzingerian Catholic who actually believes that torture is morally inexcusable. Imagine that. A member of the Catholic right openly confronting the moral horror of what this administration has permitted and will not stop. All is not lost.