Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison should be closed now

Still, the decision by the United States military to place most of its Iraqi prisoners in the vast Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad appears bizarre, for this was the center of the killing perpetrated on a vast scale by Saddam Hussein. It seems particularly troubling because, in the absence of the Iraqi biological, chemical and nuclear weapons whose possible existence was the Bush administration's chief argument for war, Saddam's murderous cruelty has become the main justification for the invasion.

Asked last week about his apparently premature "Mission Accomplished" speech of May 1, 2003, President George W. Bush said: "A year ago, I did give the speech from the carrier, saying that we had achieved an important objective, that we had accomplished a mission, which was the removal of Saddam Hussein. As a result, there are no longer torture chambers or rape rooms or mass graves in Iraq."

Here in Britain, Prime Minister Tony Blair has used similar arguments. Yet the very symbol of such torture, Abu Ghraib, continues to function. It serves as a prison holding more than half of the 8,080 Iraqi prisoners currently detained by the American authorities. The complex is surrounded by close to 1,000 unmarked graves found by U.S. soldiers soon after the invasion; these represent a fraction of the Iraqis killed there by the Saddam regime.

Captain Mark Doggett, a spokesman for the American-led coalition military forces in Baghdad, said that Abu Ghraib was being refurbished to bring it "up to Western standards", with medical facilities, improved hygiene and a decent kitchen. "It's a world apart from the condition it was left in by Saddam," he said, "but a lot of work still needs to be done."

Just how much work has been made clear by the photographs first broadcast by CBS on April 28 showing Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib, stripped naked, hooded, piled up like the corpses that once accumulated in this nightmarish place, being tormented by their American captors.
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It is not easy to make bad places good. It is hard to cleanse them of their horror; the ghosts tend to linger.

More than a dozen American officers and military police have either been reprimanded or face criminal charges for this abuse. Bush says the images caused him "deep disgust." An army report obtained by The New Yorker magazine speaks of "sadistic, blatant and wanton criminal abuses."

Just how far this all went, and at whose instigation, is now under investigation. Britain is also investigating photographs, possibly fakes, of alleged mistreatment of prisoners.

It seems safe to say that the abuses will not recur. But much damage has been done. Senator Joseph Biden, Democrat of Maryland, called the incident at Abu Ghraib "the single most significant undermining act that's occurred in a decade in that region of the world."

That may not be hyperbole. America's image in the Middle East was already in a free fall, hurt by perceptions of a tilt toward Israel and neo-colonialism in Iraq. The photographs bolstered the worst, and generally least justified, stereotypes of anti-Americanism.

So why was Abu Ghraib reopened in the first place? The Pentagon referred questions to Central Command in Florida, which referred questions to Doggett in Baghdad, who thought the Pentagon might know. Informed of this runaround, Doggett said: "I have no idea why it was decided to use Abu Ghraib. The decision was not taken by those presently in the country, but before the ground war was over."

It appears that the chief reason for using the prison lay in the need to find somewhere near Baghdad where large numbers of prisoners could immediately be held. A temporary solution then became permanent, despite the misgivings of some American officers. There were certainly no illusions about the place. Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defense, toured the prison last summer. He was shown the torture chambers. He was shown where Iraqi prisoners were hanged.

Doggett said that "a great deal of planning went into the decision to use Abu Ghraib." But, like much else about the American occupation, the transformation of such a place into America's main detention center gives the impression of improvisation in the absence of adequate planning for the postwar phase.

A damaging shortage of troops, reversals of course on the role of the United Nations, flip-flops over the employment of former Baath party members, ditto over Iraqi Army officers, and countless iterations of the plan for a political transition have also raised serious questions about postwar planning. Meanwhile, the death toll mounts.

These have been difficult weeks for those, like myself, who backed the war in Iraq as a move justified by the need, after Sept. 11, to remove a murderous dictator who would hurt America by whatever means he could find, and to inject revolutionary democratic change into a region breeding violence inspired by a totalitarian ideology. It was always a gamble but, after the loss of 3,000 lives, it appeared defensible.

Now, it seems, the possibility of a positive outcome has not been entirely lost as the United States scrambles to allow the United Nations to put in place Iraqis able to run the country after June 30. But an accumulation of errors has formed a pattern that suggest carelessness or worse.

"Abu Ghraib was handy," said Edward Mortimer, an adviser to Kofi Annan, the UN secretary general. "But was using it really the best idea?"

No, it was not. NATO, arriving in Bosnia in 1995, did not consider reopening Omarska, the camp where Serbs tortured and killed Muslims. American forces liberated Dachau on April 29, 1945, and shut it down.

John Kerry is looking for something punchy to distinguish his Iraq policy from that of Bush. Here is one small idea: Close Abu Ghraib, symbol of horror, now.

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