Iran and the Long Shadow of Abu Ghraib

Here is a post from Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish that spells out how the Bush/Cheney torture regime has completely undermined any moral legitimacy the US might have had regarding the suppression of dissent in Iran and the torture that Iran uses against its dissidents:

Here's another first-hand account of a student protester tortured by the Iranian regime after the last round of student uprisings ten years ago. What he describes is exactly what the United States did to prisoners under the Bush-Cheney torture regime:

The place was one of the semi-abandoned military camps outside Tehran that date back to the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s. There we were shoved into metal freight containers – the kind used for shipping. They stripped us naked and gave us two blankets each. Inside there was nothing to sleep on and no electric light. There was no way to tell the time except by the daylight when it shone through the watchman’s peephole at one end and a ventilation vent at the other.

This is more daylight and two more blankets than allowed the bulk of prisoners tortured under Bush and Cheney. But the cramming into windowless cages naked is classic neocon torture.

I was in the container with four other boys. We were all barely 20. And we were inside for two weeks -- naked, powerless, and face-to-face with the fear of being totally at the mercy of our captors... I was in the container with four other boys. Food was thrown in once a day. From time to time, we were taken out for questioning. And both those processes helped to destroy whatever shreds of our dignity remained.

The prisoners were beaten as part of their torture, something endemic in US captivity but formally restricted to mild forms under Cheney. There are other similarities:

The interrogations were conducted with a hood over my head. Looking down, I could see only the floor. Once I saw the hands of one of the interrogators after he cuffed my head. His hands were twice the size of mine. After two weeks, I was transferred to a succession of other prison cells, with no idea where I was. Sometimes, the cells were pitch dark. Sometimes, they had four brilliant light bulbs shining 24 hours a day.

A word to the neocons: you have no standing to protest the barbaric treatment of these prisoners any more. And you have made their torture more helpless, more powerful and more brutal than it would otherwise have been. As these protesters - the men and women hose tweets we were reading so recently - look toward America, as they try to see a beacon somewhere that would let them know that their torturers have no standing in the civilized world, they find one thing.

That beacon? Neoconservatism snuffed it out.

The West won the Cold War because they were seen as morally superior to the commies. But Bush/Cheney has undermined the future by putting the US on all fours with all the other slimey torture regimes around the world.

Here's another post on The Daily Dish that lays out the blight of Bush/Cheny torture. In this case, it is the fact that only the underlings were punished for Abu Ghraib. Admininstration officials and top CIA/military were never held accountable:

[W]hen images do show torture or execution actually happening, not just victims' bodies afterwards, they encourage us to feel enraged at the people doing it -- but those people are invariably low-level operatives, not policy-makers. And so (as essentially occurred in the case of the Abu Ghraib photographs, for example) those powerful decision-makers who are actually responsible for the system of abuse trot off into the sunset while a handful of soldiers or prison guards get labeled "sadistic" or "bad apples" and get thrown in prison. It's just never going to be photos that implicate the people at the highest levels -- that requires different kinds of sources, much less sensational but nevertheless enormously important. There's a reason tireless French anti-torture campaigner Pierre Vidal-Naquet described the entire anti-torture movement during France's Algerian War as boiling down to "a passionate quest for documents."

This isn't to say images aren't exceedingly valuable. They are. As I've said before, cell phone cameras -- and the existence of the Abu Ghraib photographs in particular -- are one huge reason for the differences between the American conversation about torture for the past several years and the French conversation (or, more often, non-conversation) about torture during the Algerian War. I believe that Obama ought to release the photographs. But ultimately photos can only be worth a thousand words when they're framed by lots and lots and lots of...words.