Historians' Reactions to Abu Ghraib

These comments were all made in the last week in response to the allegations of abuse at Abu Ghraib prison.

I’m talking about people having a good time, these people [CIA agents and MPs at Abu Ghraib], you ever heard of emotional release? You heard of need to blow some steam off? This is no different than what happens at the Skull and Bones initiation and we’re going to ruin people’s lives over it and we’re going to hamper our military effort, and then we are going to really hammer them because they had a good time. Rush Limbaugh

Anonymous (Iraqi Historian)

For Iraqis, it is much more complex than for Americans, and obviously much more painful. Iraqis are trapped by their reality. They go from being conquered by one regime to another, no matter if the first was Iraqi-grown and the other American. It's all the same to them. No one I know expects anything anymore from the Americans, except, of course, those who are hoping for fat contracts. It is total despair. Nothing to look forward to, not even"sovereignity." I can't write about this, it's such a bleak picture.

David Salmanson (History teacher at an independent school in Philadelphia)

In my classroom, I used my smartboard to look at pictures of Jews in pre-Holocaust Germany. The pictures were of things like to Hasidim with their side curls tied together, a man having his side curls burned off with a lighter, a man being kicked by laughing officers. In each picture, the Nazis had that same weird smile that the American prison guards did. I put up the images side by side: no doubt about it, the same sick smile that says: I am humiliating you because you are less than human, I know it and now you know it. But in the German pictures there are bystanders that are walking by, that are not smiling, but they are not participating. I imagine their inner torment and revulsion. But they did nothing. I don't know what to do, but we cannot do nothing. Court-martials are a start, but there needs to be a wholesale culture and strategy change in the way this war is being conducted. Not only does Rumsfeld need to resign for allowing this, so does Ashcroft, who enabled it by providing legal justifications for such treatment. And obviously a change in leadership come November would help too. America is supposed to be a shining beacon of hope unto the world not an advertisement for the pitfalls of Western Civilization.

Timothy Burke (Historian, Swarthmore College)

[T]here is a segment of the American public for whom there appear to be no conditions or events that would falsify their belief that the war in Iraq is necessary, just and winnable. More, judging not just from press reports but things I've overheard myself in conversations, there are people who believe that the conduct in Abu Gharaib was justified and if anything not extreme enough, and that the war has to be prosecuted with more intensity and force in every respect. There is the ordinary American man in today's New York Times who says,"Wipe them all out". There are those who many of us have overheard saying,"Well, if it comes to that, we have nukes".

There's nothing you can really say to this kind of fairly unapologetic exterminationism. Either it's basically insane and therefore completely barred to reason--how did"wipe them all out" become the aim of a war undertaken for humanitarian reasons?--or it is supra-rational and reveals that the war has been always at its core a New Crusade against Islam, a deliberately and intentionally exterminationist or brutalist program.

Tom Engelhardt (Author of of The End of Victory Culture and co-editor of History Wars, The Enola Gay and Other Battles for the American Past.)

[D]uring the period in the spring of 2003 when our media expressed outrage (as they should have) over the parading of American POWs before Iraqi propaganda cameras, they were showing the first shots of hooded Iraqi prisoners in what looked like burlap sacks. If you go back to our newspapers of that moment, you'll find such photos presented without comment and they were relatively commonplace on TV. No one discussed"hooding" as a practice until the photos of the hooded prisoners at Abu Ghraib suddenly made it look like a horror. And yet the practice, clearly systematic, had to have been carefully planned out and prepared for. Those bags didn't just materialize from the palm groves along the roadside. They must have been shipped in with the troops. I'm not an expert on war crimes, but I find it hard to believe that the hooding of prisoners is an agreed upon international practice in time of war.

Eric Alterman (Historian and MSNBC blogger)

There's little doubt at this point that the defenders of the Avignon Presidency will settle upon some variation of"They Deserved It/Don't You Know There's A War On?" ends justifying means as a response for what is going to be a long several months of new video releases from the various other outlets of the Blockbuster Gulag. What else is left for them, assuming that they're not really serious about Rich Lowry's"Hey, It's Just Like Mapplethorpe's Stuff" argument? The"Few Bad Apples" trope doesn't even pass the Guffaw Test any more -- not with the military press angrier in its demands for high-level scalps than the civilian press ever thought of being. It's going to be a little hard to blame this one on the Clintons -- although people have tried their best. But, while I agree with Josh Marshall that in this way lies madness, imagine for a moment what we'd be hearing if this had happened on Clinton's watch, and if Hillary Clinton had announced that she was too delicate a flower to look at the photos that were hitting hubby's administration below the waterline. Tom DeLay would've grown another head by now.

Keith Halderman (Ph.D. candidate in American History at American University and HNN blogger)

Apparently, one of the casualties of the war in Iraq has been the intellect of Thomas Sowell. On Thursday the Washington Times published a column by Sowell which argued that the messenger deserved the blame for the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. He wrote, “What the media did, irresponsibly, was send inflammatory photographs around the world.” Sowell goes on to suggest that it would have been better to wait until after those responsible had been punished before making the pictures freely available. He asks the question, ”If a colonel is conducting a court martial and the generals over him are publicly denouncing those on trial, will that be considered a fair trial whose verdicts will stand up on appeal?” In the first place, it is extremely doubtful that anyone would have had a court marital without the release of the photos. There may have been some low level non-judicial punishment done quietly but those responsible, those who gave the orders, would have had nothing to fear. Because these photographs have garnered so much attention it will be much more difficult to summarily penalize the enlisted personnel and stop there. After all, the media is talking about over 1800 photographs and that is not the work of a few rogue guards that is the work of a system. Also, while we are worrying about fair trials for the guards let us take a moment to remember that none of the Iraqi participants in the naked pyramids had any kind of trial, impartial or otherwise.