Robert Stone has just posted some further thoughts to his post from yesterday in response to readers' comments at the bottom of that post. As with everything he writes, you should check it out. He is particularly sharp on the question of whether Abu Ghraib was the deliberate result of policy or the product of pure folly: "I hope nobody thinks that I believe identifying something as a pathetic fuckup automatically excuses it. AG was a crime against humanity -no hyperbole- and a fuckup as well." Yup, and Stone hits it on the head, too, when he addresses the suggestion that crops up repeatedly in the comments that the "bad apples" were psychopaths who merit no sympathy. As he writes: "The responsibility is always partly with the individual but the leadership and placement of these troops, their lack of education, their status as throwaway people from a throwaway poverty belt (All imposed on them by our society and particularly Bush-Cheney) are extenuating. Not exculpatory. Extenuating."

I said in my last post that I would address some points in this week's discussion, so let me start with that last point: the proposition, repeatedly put forward in the comments, that by expressing some sympathy for the MPs who came to be known as the bad apples, I was seeking to let them off the hook. I can assure you that nobody who has read my book, Standard Operating Procedure, has made such a charge.

I make it very clear that the MPs knew that everything they were doing was wrong. But I also make it clear that there was no recourse in their chain of command and that the wrongness was constantly reinforced by their senior officers as the right thing to do on the Military Intelligence block. Nothing they did was a secret from their senior officers - so the MPs felt they had what Graner described as either explicit or tacit approval at every step of their descent into routine brutality. Did they resist? Some were a lot more enthusiastic than others, but no - they did not resist, and for that they are responsible, of course. But to understand what America got into at Abu Ghraib, it's also necessary to understand how hard it would have been for the lowliest soldier to register a complaint - how totally decent leadership was lacking, and how totally acquiescent the chain of command was in throwing aside their training and complying with the corrupt and criminal practices of the order they served. There was an MP who is often cited for having refused to serve on the MI block after his first night - which happened to be the night that Graner and Frederick stacked their prisoners in the notorious human pyramid. This MP, Matthew Wisdom was reassigned to guard duty in the watch towers. A righteous man in Abu Ghraib? Perhaps. But it's worth understanding that the guards in the towers were called upon from time to time, during prisoner protests over conditions in the tented camps, to fire on prisoners with live ammunition. Shooting defenseless prisoners behind barbed wire - and killing some, sometimes even those who were just cooling their heels in their tents - well, that hardly sounds like a relief from having to commit war crimes on the Military Intelligence block. But of course nobody has ever been held to account for those shootings, which were retrospectively OK'd by military review.

In my book I detail the policies that led to the crimes at Abu Ghraib, and the way those policies were transmitted through the chain of command. I tell how the prison was brought back into use after being pillaged after Saddam emptied it. I describe how the woman who had run interrogations at Bagram airbase in Afghanistan while three prisoners there had been killed by MP guards was given the same job at Abu Ghraib, even before General Miller brought Rumsfeld's interrogation rules in from Gitmo. I tell how nobody knew what the hell they were doing, even as everyone came armed with ever greater authority and license. I describe how the CIA operated in the interrogation block of the prison by different rules from Military Intelligence, and how civilian contract interrogators also had somewhat different ideas of what they were supposed to do and what they were allowed. I document also how the MPs were instrumentalized by each of these intelligence-gathering operations as the muscle men, designated for the nasty work of trying to break the resistance of prisoners for interrogation.

All of that is there, and much of it is told through the voices of the individual soldiers who served at the prison. I told the story of America's dishonor as a war story involving a particular unit of young men and women. And I regret that the nature of intensively detailed documentary information is that it doesn't translate well into paraphrase and generalization - and so a good deal of it gets lost in trying to distill some larger points of discussion in a context like this book group.

Finally - I want to respond to Jeff Goldberg's question to me: Can the stain of Abu Ghraib be removed. My feeling is no - it cannot be removed, any more than the stain of other great political crimes that define a historical moment can be removed. And even if they could be removed, I don't think it would be desirable to remove them - that way lies revisionist denial. But I do think one can put these stains behind one, make them history - and for now, the stain of Abu Ghraib remains appallingly present: we still have these prisons, and these prisoners, and both sides of the aisle in Congress have backed waterboarding. Meanwhile, our only elected official who is a survivor of torture, John McCain, has disgraced himself by joining the pro-waterboarding crowd out of political expediency. So the stain is, if anything spreading at this point.

As for the future: Jeff asks whether it would help if Iraq were to become a peaceful electoral democracy. I'm not holding my breath for that to happen in the next five years - the timeframe he proposes - but I'd love to be surprised. Still, while I think that would help on many other fronts, I don't see how it would anyway mitigate, diminish or justify, much less remove the stain of Abu Ghraib. Because the stain is ours - America's - not Iraq's (that country has its own stains to live down with a sane form of government). How do we get past it? Acknowledging it, accounting for it, re-criminalizing torture, sending the people who have made it the law of the land to Jail (as Jeff advocates), sending a clear message to our troops, to ourselves, to our allies, and to our enemies that we are putting this chapter of dishonor behind us, as we put slavery behind us. And just as with slavery, we will have to accept that the stain will linger and continue to taint us for a very very very long time to come.