Rory -- many thanks for weighin in and for your insights.

You're absolutely right that "an officer wouldn't need a regulation book to intervene if she or he saw a pile of naked bodies" -- but the reason I dwelt at some length on the rewriting of the rules at Abu Ghraib is that the new policies handed down by General Sanchez and his shop, and the confused chain of command between the intelligence analysts and interrogators, on the one hand, and the MP guards on the other, all contributed to making it unclear what was legal and what was illegal. The officers were the conveyor belts for the corrupt, laissez-faire, acquiescene to or encouragement of abuse that the guards practiced. And a lot of officers did pass through the Military Intelligenc block where the naked bodies were trussed and paraded, shackled to their cages or stacked on the floor -- and these officers did not object or impose discipline. The MI colonel who ran the prison, Thomas Pappas, and his deputy Lt. Col. Steven Jordan, were on the block frequently, as were Colonels and Captains of the Military Police -- as well as military lawyers and medics. And they saw many of the conditions that you see in the picture and did not raise a fuss. Nudity had become invisible at the prison -- which is astonishing, when you think of how shockingly and obviously wrong it struck everyone when they first saw the pictures. Nobody has ever been reprimanded or punished for keeping prisoners naked -- so the break down was comprehensive. The abuses were seen and known and they did not trigger the appropriate responses.

And this touches on your larger question -- why we are so ready to accept, or as flavius says above, approve abusive treatment and torture? The ease with which it was accepted in the military and in the general public derives from the same sense, constantly reenforced by the rhetoric of the post-9-11 hawks, that we were fighting a new kind of war with a new kind of enemy and that anything we did to them was OK because it was better than what they'd do to us. So a mixture of fear and swagger and deep loss of our national moral compass -- a kind of arrogant triumphalism in what was, after all, a war of revenge -- let to a widespread attitude of wounded entitlement to do "whatever it took." But as I say in the book, If you fight terror with terror, how do you know which is which?

In this respect, I think the Abu Ghraib photographs could have performed a great public service -- and the story of Abu Ghraib still can - by delivering a powerful reminder of what we really look like if we accept what should be unacceptable and approve what we claim to stand steadfastly against. By focusing public ire on the MPs in the photographs, rather than on all that lies outside the frame but created the context for those repellent images, we were able to pretend that this wasn't really our new image in the world. But the world has told us otherwise, quite consistently -- and we have yet to sieze the opportunity to disprove that view.

I understand your worry about letting everyone off the hook by letting the little guys go while we pursue the big guys who may well succeed in being untouchable -- but that does not make a very good argument for the injustice of locking up the scapegoats because you can and it's better to have somebody behind bars than nobody. If our military and political leaders cannot be held to account, we are in very much deeper trouble as a democratic republic than even those photographs suggest.

"Why we are so ready to accept or approve abusive treatment and torture?"

Because a good many Americans feel that the victims deserve it, no? Blended in with this, and perhaps underlying it, is one of the chief tenets of America's "civic religion": F--- with us and we'll
f--- with you and your kind, ten times over and feel (or try to feel) righteous about it. Such thinking is not unique to this country, but we've made a specialty of it.

Why is it So Easy to Accept Torture?

Rephrasing the question to "how does torture become acceptable?"

1) Stimulus extinction. Repeated exposure deadens response.

2) Breaking the ice/threshold behavior barriers. Combat soldiers face initial reluctance to shoot to kill. After the first time, it becomes much easier (so they say).

3) Authority. Authority figures say it is okay.

4) Peer pressure: group pressure to be "tough" derision of "wimps".

5) Publicly provided rationale's. Utilitarian arguments muddy initial revulsion. Over-analysis

6) False retributionism. "They must have done something to deserve it."

7) Misassociation of actors/conflation. (see pt 6 above)

8) Dehumanization of outgroups. Someone I debated suggested the detainees could be justifiably treated "worse than animals"

9) Remoteness of context. "Not our community". What happens across the street is more "real"

10) Information overload. Too much happening, too many calls coming in demanding response, responses get diluted.

Rory Stewart --

Thanks for making the only intelligent post on the subject so far. You seem to be the only contributor to have abandoned the false dilemma presented by Karr and Gourevitch i.e. the either/or prosecution of leadership and rank and file, and the gender politics and class politics being dragged into this by them.

And yes, as you point out so perceptively:

It looks to me - from a distance - as though the real challenges are two-fold: to clear out the clutter that muddles our sense of right and wrong and to identify who to hold responsible. I completely understand why you take the focus away from junior individuals like England or Graner in order to blame people higher up the chain. But the risk, of course, is that the 'higher-ups' are hard to identify or accuse with enough specificity - which shifts the blame back onto a more abstract system. This can in some sense let everyone off the hook both at the top and the bottom: rather than making both senior and junior alike share the shame of the atrocities.

Exactly.

On the one hand we could clearly say: the whole thing from top to bottom was wrong, and a failure to prosecute any part of the chain is just that: a failure of morality and accountability. That puts the emphasis entirely on the need to continue prosecuting those up the chain.

Karr and Gourevitch are just muddying the waters with sophistry, identity politics, misplaced sympathies, and overall sloppy thinking. Which is a sure way to get nowhere and let everybody off the hook.

In America, we had a jurist, Associate Justice Felix Frankfurter, who as concerned with the effect on the gerneral populace that the lawless acts of the state could cause.

In Rochin v California where a prisoner (detainee we might say now) had been coercively interrogated, Justice Frankfurter expressed this concept:

"Coerced confessions offend the community’s sense of fair play and decency. So here, to sanction the brutal conduct which naturally enough was condemned by the court whose judgment is before us, would be to afford brutality the cloak of law. Nothing [342 U.S. 165, 174] would be more calculated to discredit law and thereby to brutalize the temper of a society.”

So America's temper, never the most civilized of the Western nations, has been tried by the so-called War on Terror, and perhaps "brutalization" is not too strong a word. For as proof, not one single jurist has risen in the face of evidence of horrendous prisoner abuse and even murder, to repeat Frankfurter's concerns.