Decline and Fall

Jim Henley has an interesting post up at Unqualified Offerings about torture and its long-term ramifications. It's centered on a passage in Mark Bowden's Atlantic cover story on the events leading up to the killing of Abu Musab Zarqawi where the interrogator tells an important detainee: "You don't want to go to Abu Ghraib, and I can help you, but you have to give me something in trade." Byron York at The Corner believes this to have been a reference to the detainee's belief that torture is still practiced at Abu Ghraib prison, and both Henley and Eric Martin agree that's what it means, while coming to different conclusions about it.

I'm not so sure though. In my experience, Iraqi detainees were less afraid of Abu Ghraib because of those photos than they were afraid because of the spartan conditions, danger (it was one of the most frequently attacked places in Iraq and many of those attacks were targeted at the detainees themselves), disruption in their lives, uncertainty about their future, and the very real and widely-understood possibility that they would disappear down a bureaucratic black hole from which they might take years to escape. Abu Ghraib is a prison, and being in prison sucks, whether you're being tortured for information or ignored altogether.

Actually, detainees were far more fearful of going to an Iraqi-run prison. They knew that the Iraqi Police and Army were only too willing to beat, electrocute, cut, twist, or otherwise harm their prisoners, and they had no desire to be subjected to that. Keeping them in American custody was often an incentive, given their alternatives.

Labels: GWOT, interrogation, Iraq