Don’t You Dare Pardon Abu Ghraib

Janice Karpinski, the former commander of Abu Ghraib prison, tells CNN that the seven guards convicted of abusing prisoners should be pardoned. The Bush torture memos show they were just following orders, says Karpinski, who also thinks the Pentagon owes her for being demoted from general to colonel.

Karpinski doesn’t get it. Six years after the human pyramids and the prisoners on dog leashes, she still has no sense of responsibility. In a way, it kind of vindicates the Bush administration. It shows the rot wasn’t just at the top, but the bottom as well.

“I was just following orders” is not a defense for soldiers, or policemen, or judges, or the Mafia henchman whose boss tells him to pull the trigger. The Abu Ghraib guards should have known those were illegal orders. They knew that if  U.S. soldiers had endured the same treatment, America would have accused their tormentors of war crimes. Disobediene might have led to a slap on the wrist, but no more. As Holocaust scholar Daniel Goldhagen points out, even in Nazi Germany, no German was ever seriously punished for refusing an order to kill Jews. Was a slap on the wrist too high a price to pay for a clean conscience?

But that would suggest the abusers acted out of fear. What’s stark in my mind is the photo of the guards flashing a thumbs-up at the pyramid of naked Iraqi prisoners. That’s not torture, which could at least have a rational goal of extracting information. It was sadism. Most of us have had some figure in our life who abused us for some higher goal, or “for our own good”.  We knew they did it because they enjoyed the satisfaction of using their power over others.

If Karpinski still doesn’t understand that, then it shows her deficiencies as a soldier and a commander. If the torture apologists don’t get it, then it shows their deficiencies as human beings.