Tortured logic

Big Ben, whose opinion I respect, had some sharp criticism for this post on the New York Times’ portrayal of Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse. Reading his comment, I see that I could have done a better job of explaining why the Times article struck me as inappropriate.

Let's get something out of the way right up front: I make no defense for the actions of U.S. personnel at Abu Ghraib. Whether simply humiliating, or, in other cases, physically violent, such tactics are (1) unacceptable on human rights grounds, (2) of dubious utility as intelligence-gathering techniques, and (3) devastating to America's international credibility as a force for good.

Certainly, some of the acts in question went well beyond "frat-house hazing-style abuse", which was an inappropriately glib term for me to use. Prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib did represent a case of power and hatred leading people to commit violent, abusive, and, yes, evil acts -- and in that limited respect, Benedict Carey’s article in the Times is fair enough.

But Carey goes overboard by including Abu Ghraib on a short list of inhumanity’s greatest hits, along with the Nazi death camps, the Killing Fields, savage beheadings, and the ethnic cleansing of Kosovo. True, he doesn't explicitly claim that Abu Ghraib was the equivalent of the Holocaust. But he's only too happy to juxtapose the two, and let the reader draw the inference.

If Carey needed another example of true evil, he would have been better off looking at Abu Ghraib under Saddam's rule, when his Ba'ath regime executed thousands of political prisoners there every year, sometimes killing over 100 in a single day.

Carey's inclusion of U.S. prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib amidst a selection of much worse atrocities, and in place of so many others that might have been included instead (like the U.N. child rape scandal in the Congo), suggests that his true motivation in doing so was to take a cheap shot at the U.S. military by associating it with history's most murderous regimes and cruelest terrorists.

At any rate, Carey does cite all the events as comparable, claiming that they each demonstrate how ordinary people are easily led to commit horrible acts.

Such a comparison is not valid.

While disgraced troops like Lynndie England and Charles Graner apparently had no problem humiliating or abusing prisoners, it’s my hunch that they would have balked at feeding children into the ovens at Auschwitz.

The creation of an entire infrastructure for the wholesale murder of millions of men, women, and children is way past prisoner abuse on the evilometer. As Samuel Jackson said in Pulp Fiction, comparing oral sex to a foot massage, it “ain't the same ballpark, it ain't the same league, it ain't even the same f***in' sport.”

The abuses at Abu Ghraib fall far short of Nazi-level atrocities, in number but more importantly in kind. There is a fundamental difference between beating a prisoner, and deliberately rounding up civilians for the express purpose of exterminating them.

Grouping Abu Ghraib together with Nazi prison camps, the Killing Fields, or other, similar atrocities is dangerous, because it diminishes their historical significance. The Abu Ghraib abuses, while shameful and criminal, hardly, as Carey wrote, "suggest how much further people can go when they feel justified." They don't even begin to.

I’m reminded of a scene from The Incredibles, when Dash’s mom tells him that "everybody is special."

"Which is another way of saying that no one is," he replies.

And when everyone’s a Nazi, no one is, either.