Reed Brody, a veteran human rights defender and special counsel with Human Rights Watch, places the blame for abuses at Abu Ghraib squarely on the shoulders of President George Bush's administration.
You've written that the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib was not an isolated incident, despite the insistence of senior U.S. military and civilian officials that it was perpetrated by "a few bad apples." On what grounds?
RB: The only thing exceptional about what happened at Abu Ghraib was that it was caught on camera. When you consider the discussions people in Washington were having about employing torture or other forms of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, or the specific authorization of illegal interrogation tactics for use in Guantanamo Bay, Afghanistan, and Iraq, or when you consider the U.S. government's failure to take any corrective action over the years following repeated reports of abuse, what happened at Abu Ghraib shouldn't come as a surprise.
Do you believe it was officially sanctioned?
On what's known so far, we can't conclude that that arranging prisoners into human pyramids or attaching electrodes to their bodies was authorized, but once you say that inflicting pain and humiliation on detainees is a legitimate objective, it is not surprising that ordinary soldiers came to believe that even extreme forms of abuse were acceptable.
What, in your view, are the potential dangers and repercussions of this scandal?
I think we're at a moment of truth in the human rights movement. The risk is that this kind of behavior will be normalized in the sense that no higher-ups will be held to account. If so, then in generations to come, anytime human rights defenders call for the redress of abuses, Abu Ghraib is going to be cited as a justification, pretext or excuse. On the other hand, we also have a rare opportunity to achieve accountability in one of the most high-profile cases of abuse in our time.
What should be done next?
First, we need to get all the facts, ideally through a 9/11-style public investigation. The administration needs to make public all instructions it gave on interrogation in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Guantanamo. Then anyone up the chain of command, who ordered, authorized, or acquiesced to torture must be brought to justice. That should entail prosecution in appropriate cases, not just administrative sanctions.
