Crime Cover-Up

During his visit to South Korea, Barack Obama decried the actions at Abu Ghraib prison as a monstrous violation of human rights and a mass mistreatment of women shocking even during wartime. The incident must be recognized and investigated.

Obama’s words also apply to Japan, whose troops abducted over 200,000 women and girls from occupied territories and forced them into military bordellos in the 1940s, a violation that hangs heavily between Japan and Korea even today, not least because Japan euphemistically refers to the women as “comfort ladies” whose history is still being trivialized.

Obama said the right thing but the Japanese government diplomatically says only that the discussion is appropriate. Requests from the U.S. president that others respect human rights ring hollow as long as the nation remains oblivious to the human rights abuses perpetrated by its own troops and mercenaries in Iraq and continues to ignore looking into them.

Thus far, President Obama has allowed the 10th anniversary of the Abu Ghraib torture revelations to pass without comment. In place of any comment, he instead pointed an admonishing finger in Asia’s direction. No comment on the photos of U.S. soldiers with prisoners stripped naked in order to mortify them; no mention of the human pyramids of prisoners behind which their captors struck macho poses for the camera; not a word about a female soldier leading a prisoner around on a leash as if he were a dog; nothing about the soldier who is seen leaning over the corpse of a dead prisoner and grinning broadly for a snapshot.

Abu Ghraib, along with Guantanamo, makes up one of the darkest periods in a war on terror started by George W. Bush. The American military historian Andrew Bacevich coined the most colorful figure of speech describing the actions at Abu Ghraib: “The U.S. troops who so grotesquely abused Iraqis detained there let the last of the air out of the liberation balloon.”

Unlike Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib is now history — although the investigation into human rights violations there is proceeding even more slowly than the closure of the Cuban compound. To be exact, the closure hasn’t even begun there. Abu Ghraib has been forgotten and the memory suppressed. The torture scandal is no longer the subject of public debate. Only a handful of newspapers even bothered to publish any of the 2004 Abu Ghraib photographs that necessarily remind all Americans of the perverse offshoots that grew out of the war on terror.

While Obama has called Abu Ghraib an abyss incompatible with America’s moral standards, nothing else has changed very much. Not investigating the scandal is in itself a scandal. A mere handful of the participants charged have been punished. The officers who ordered the actions, on the other hand, got off with warnings or reductions in grade. The control system in the U.S. military broke down. High-ranking members of the U.S. government either looked the other way or approved the torture and mistreatment of prisoners.

Four former Abu Ghraib prisoners are still attempting to bring a private security firm before an American court. In this way, they hope to receive compensation denied to them by the U.S. government. These mercenaries, incidentally, were not legally prosecuted. A federal court argued that since the torture wasn’t carried out on U.S. soil, they cannot be tried in a U.S. court. What a cynical argument.

Obama bears no responsibility for Abu Ghraib. He has already ended the torture program and wants to do away with Guantanamo. Responsibility for the scandal rests solely with George W. Bush who, after releasing the torture photographs ten years ago, promised a full investigation of the matter, a promise he never kept.

But Obama is, however, responsible for recognizing and admitting the legal, moral and political misdeeds perpetrated there. If he does so, America’s reputation will no longer be stuck at so low a point, allowing the restoration of presidential credibility when he asks another country to look into a dark chapter of its own history.