The Dance of Civilizations: The West, the East, and Abu Ghraib

...Alas, the Abu Ghraib photographs have led to the voicing of much essentialist nonsense about America (and essentialism is always a form of romance...

...citizen...

...Susan Sontag, in one of the most widely read pieces on Abu Ghraib, leaned heavily, though not exclusively, on the cultural argument...

...Yet necessity does not dissolve the morally problematic nature of the measures we take, nor absolve us of their wrongness...

...And yet, and yet: I am suspicious of those who rail against permissiveness and pop, whether they situate themselves stage left or right...

...And almost instantly, they became internationally recognized icons...

...but this does not tell us all we need to know about how to fight pitiless nihilists who regard suicidecum-murder as life's best experience— and who do not, alas, represent an isolated, disowned lunatic fringe of the Muslim or Arab world...

...Yes, the Constitution is the incontrovertible bedrock of our democracy...

...I am not the most able—or, even, a minimally competent—defender of American pop culture, much of which either bewilders or revolts me...

...My students frequently remark on the apparently awesome lacunae in my store of cultural knowledge, while the man I live with calls me "Miss Havisham," which implies (I think) that I am not the most happenin' gal...

...Often, though, what these commissars 48 n DISSENT / Winter 2005 objected to wasn't really the form itself but, rather, its dangerous availability to the unwashed masses...

...Danner has described the photos as a "shame multiplier": "The ubiquitous digital camera .. . [was] there to let the detainee know that the humiliation would not stop when the act itself did but would be preserved into the future...

...It is estimated that more than ten million viewers have downloaded Berg's murder...

...He rejects the view, put forth so vociferously by Bush and Company, that after September 11 "everything changed," and he is right to do so...

...Nor do I doubt that the incessantly brutal images and sounds that bombard children and teens have a deleterious effect on their moral awareness...

...We need the revivification of the far too dormant adversarial legal process...

...Not only targeted assassination is at stake...

...And this is not because all such practices are equal— clearly they are not—but because to do so misses the salient fact, and to miss the salient fact is increasingly dangerous...

...Hersh reports that at the very start of the war in Afghanistan—on October 7, 2001—American intelligence believed it had tracked an automobile convoy that included Mullah Omar, but that the military's central command lawyer on duty in Florida would not authorize a strike against him...

...So did 9/11...

...In this view, the Abu Ghraib abuses stemmed directly from a series of extra-legal findings of the Bush administration after September 11, 2001, and from the interrogation tactics those findings either allowed or encouraged...

...How this fight should be pursued is a question with political, strategic, and moral dimensions that are not immediately self-evident, nor magically in sync with each other...

...For Richard Mouw, an evangelical Christian who heads the Fuller Theological Seminary in California, the abuse stems from a "'highly sexualized' popular culture...

...Ignatieff considers an eclectic group of historic precedents, including Abraham Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus during the Civil War, the destruction of the Weimar Republic, the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, and the 1999 Israeli Supreme Court decision outlawing torture in interrogations...

...surely they are among the most widely disseminated ever...

...In Afghanistan...

...Hersh writes that it was this frustration that led Donald Rumsfeld to create a "highly secret program, which was given blanket advance approval to kill or capture and, if possible, interrogate high-value targets...

...Huda Shaker al-Nuaimi, an Iraqi political scientist working with Amnesty International, believes that one such released prisoner has already been killed...

...The historian Ronald Steel opened his Lesser Evil review in the Sunday New York Times with an unusually nasty zinger: "Michael Ignatieff tells us how to do terrible things for a righteous cause and come away feeling good about it...

...Those who have most strenuously mocked the failures of our war against al-Qaeda are those who have most strenuously opposed George W. Bush...

...The behavior these photographs document is bad, but it is the very fact that the photographs were made, and the happiness of the tormentors that they show, that disorients us...

...Many Western commentators have noted that, as a New York Times editorial put it, the Abu Ghraib prisoners were abused "in exactly the manner most horrific to Muslims...

...What Hersh describes in his book is targeted assassination...

...Even stranger are the delicate ways some Western observers describe—or rather avoid describing—the war against women in which much of the Islamic world is engaged...

...For Charles Colson, the Watergate felon who is now a preacher, the problem is "a steady diet of MTV and pornography...

...But adherents of the cultural-poison view are found not only among conservatives and the religious right...

...That's not a bad thing, it's a democratic thing...

...Is this a legitimate tactic in fighting a group like al-Qaeda...

...I often cover my eyes at the beginning of Law and Order (too violent) and at movie trailers (too violent...

...Liberals have traditionally argued that environment influences moral development and, in particular, the proclivity to violence...

...the "culture of shamelessness" that Sontag condemns is hard to defend, and needn't be...

...It is striking—and spooky— how the cultural conservatives' condemnation of America sounds just like the Islamic fundamentalists' condemnation of America, which, as the Iranian-born Rouzbeh Pirouz wrote, depicts "western culture as degenerate and subversive...

...Stewart has been accused of publicizing the call to jihad of her client, convicted terrorist Omar Abdel Rahman, thereby allegedly breaking a series of special agreements she had signed with the government...

...and ruled that any attempt by Congress to regulate the interrogation of so-called unlawful combatants would be unconstitutional...

...And here an odd paradox emerges...

...Anywhere...

...And he claims, rightly, that a country that has been attacked, or has enemies dedicated to its destruction, does not necessarily face an existential threat...

...For Paul Vitz, described by the Washington Post as "a Catholic professor of psychology at New York University who studies the intersection of religion and psychology," the Abu Ghraib pictures are "a no-brainer," the clear result of young people's immersion "in the pornography and violence of American pop culture...

...At a debate at the 2002 Telluride Film Festival, Michael Moore triumphantly pointed to Bush's inability to get—that is, to capture or kill—terrorist leaders such as Osama bin Laden and the Taliban's Mullah Muhammad Omar: "Mission not accomplished...

...history that are not, really, so far in the past, such as the My Lai massacre...

...tolerance is not self-destruction...

...Two major proponents of this line of thought, or non-thought, are Donald Rumsfeld and Slavoj Zizek...

...The first explanation is political, and has been put forth by Seymour Hersh, Mark Danner, Anthony Lewis, and the editorial pages of various newspapers such as the New York Times and the Washington Post...

...Yet precisely by making instantly, viscerally clear the things we reject, the photographs make it easy for us to avoid thinking about the things we might need to accept...

...I have never seen a reality TV show, logged on to an Internet porn site, or played a video game...

...It cannot go unnoticed that the twentieth century exploded in violence on an unprecedented scale—including particularly vicious sexual violence (see, for instance, the mass rapes of German women by victorious Soviet troops, the gang rapes that accompanied the genocide in Rwanda, the Serbian rape camps, and the "rape slaves" of the Congo War)—quite without the help of Internet pornography, slasher films, or video games...

...This was followed by a series of secret, high-level government memos, since leaked...

...Rather, they make clear—or at least should—the many ways in which East and West are now joined, intimately and unwillingly, in a diabolical pas de deux of violence and death: joined in image and reality, as perpetrators and voyeurs...

...in the New York Review of Books, for instance, Anthony Lewis called it "remarkable...

...Frank Rich has mocked all this as "laughable," adding, "Some of our self-appointed moral leaders are defending the morally indefensible by annexing Abu Ghraib as another front in America's election-year culture war...

...For how can we trust a world in which my pain, or yours, is the pride and joy of another, and where impunity reigns...

...a blend of perversity, wickedness and sadism...

...Hersh continues, "as many as ten times since early October [2001], Air Force pilots believed they'd ABU GHRAIB had senior Al Qaeda and Taliban members in their sights but had been unable to act in time because of legalistic hurdles...

...Iraq...

...But his book makes clear that he would reject the equally deluded insistence that September 11 didn't, or at least shouldn't, change much at all, and that Islamic extremism poses a threat no greater or different than, say, the Mafia or drug cartels...

...If not, are you willing to pay the price of not using them...

...He is highly critical of the historic tendency to concentrate power in the executive branch during national emergencies...

...has been the thrashing about of a democratic system that feels disgraced...

...We need meaningful congressional engagement and oversight of every aspect of the war on terror, instead of the shameful passivity both houses of Congress have evinced since 9/1 1 . (The recent election makes this much harder...

...This is an odd, or perhaps willful, misreading of the book, for Ignatieff's explicit point is that we may now face a situation where "tragic choices" must be made: The luxury of feeling good is over...

...So while the culture of permissiveness has its problems, apparently the culture of repression does too...

...Though he rarely mentions the Bush administration by name, his book can only be read as an indictment of it: "Emergencies become a challenge to democracy and to law when proclaimed on grounds that involve bad faith, manipulation of evidence, exaggeration of risk, or prospect of political advantage...

...Ours is the most creepily intimate relation to these pictures, for it is our troops doing the torturing, our war (even if you oppose it) in which they fight, and our press in which the photos were first exposed...

...Both these reactions obscure the real meaning of the Abu Ghraib photographs...

...Nowhere...

...and now they have Bush...

...and Rajaa Habib Khuzaai, a woman doctor who served on the Iraqi Governing Council, has said that the fate of such inmates, if freed, "is just too horrible to imagine...

...We may need to do things, consciously and purposely, that are wrong and necessary: necessary to save the lives of innocent civilians, necessary to preserve the liberal democratic state that protects our freedoms...

...In the American press, there are two schools of explanation for how and why American soldiers came to torture Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib, and how and why they came to photograph the torture...

...So though I have no way of measuring the pop-cult savvy of Susan Sontag or Rebecca Hagelin, I can unequivocally attest to my own cluelessness...

...The perniciousness of a terrorist threat, he writes, is precisely that it forces a wedge beDISSENT / Winter 2005 n 5 ABU GHRAIB tween collective interests and minority rights, whereas liberal democracy rests on the belief that the two can be harmonized...

...But they have had less fortunate consequences, too...

...Our task is to strengthen the culture—that is, the institutions— of American democracy while fighting a war against terrorist groups...

...But he also argues, Neither necessity nor liberty, neither public danger nor private rights constitute trumping claims...

...In the photos of humiliated Iraqi prisoners, what we get is, precisely, an insight into 'American values.'" This made me wonder, albeit briefly, what an effective initiation into Slovenian culture might be like and what, precisely, a "Slovenian value" is...

...But what, I wonder, has warped the mind and heart of Abu Musab alZarqawi—he of the filmed beheading of Nicholas Berg—and of his enthusiastic followers, who number far more than those England could ever hope to attract...

...In this, they join a long and ignoble line of photographs— including those of lynching carnivals in the American South, and those taken in too many European countries during the Nazi period— that not only depict cruelty but celebrate it...

...Thus, Howard Schneider, the Washington Post's Cairo correspondent, explained that the Abu Ghraib pictures are particularly offensive to inhabitants of those countries where "women, through practices like veiling, are encouraged to take a demure attitude toward sexual matters...

...The British think not...

...the hope that we can go through life, or through history, without ever doing bad things is, I think, a particularly American kind of optimism, borne of our ABU GHRAIB tradition of great strength and good fortune...

...The opposite is true: it is our removal from the discussion that opens the space for conservative domination of it...

...their application requires balancing liberty and necessity, pure principle and prudence...

...The point, again, is not to engage in a contest of dueling cultural practices...

...For Rumsfeld, the Abu Ghraib tortures are, as he testified to Congress in May, "certainly fundamentally un-American...

...They have inspired a global conversation...

...Despite the ardent hopes of isolationists left and right, we are all now joined at the hip— and everywhere else—whether we like it or not...

...rOR ME, THE question that the Abu Ghraib photographs raise is not, finally, whether Americans are Really Good, as Rumsfeld would have it, or Really Bad, as Zizek suggests...

...They defined torture as only those acts that cause such "serious physical" injuries as organ damage, impaired bodily function, or death...

...I N HIS NEW BOOK, The Lesser Evil: Politics and Ethics in an Age of Terror, Michael Ignatieff wrestles with these treacherous questions, charting a path between moral and legal absolutism on the one hand and valueneutral pragmatism on the other...

...of the prisoner who lies naked and bloody on a bloodstained concrete floor...

...Millions of people throughout the world have now seen the Abu Ghraib images...

...on signs, leaflets, and posters...

...It would be a costly mistake for liberals and leftists to leave the debate over security and liberty—as we have left so many others—to conservatives, on the assumption that even to engage in such talk will sully our moral purity or play into the hands of the right...

...The tortures resulted from the Pandora's Box opened by the secret, unprecedented, egregiously unilateral—that is, undemocratic—decisions made by the Bush administration that excluded "enemy combatant" detainees from due process and legally humane treatment...

...put the Japanese in camps during World War II...

...The pictures remind us, if we need reminding, of what we are against, which is, most simply put, cruelty...

...And if you're tired of the twentieth century, take a look at the twenty-first...

...We need a skeptical, thoughtful press that is alive, awake, and unafraid...

...the ability to live outside marriage...

...at the peculiar crouch— knees bent, pelvis tilted back—of the terrified men who face the growling dogs...

...And this in a supposedly "secular" country...

...at the little tilt of the shiny, ugly black hoods on the heads of the prisoners who are forced into simulated fellatio...

...Yet it is Bush's most fervent antagonists who are most loath to discuss what such "accomplishments" will entail...

...but it does assume, at least implicitly, that people will be ashamed, and fear the consequences, of the hurtful acts they commit...

...Multilateralism is a good strategy, and even a good principle, but it cannot determine whether a war is just nor, alternately, justify a refusal to act...

...Furthermore, the "moral relativism" and "sexual anarchy" that Rebecca Hagelin rails against is intimately connected, I suspect, to the moral relativism and sexual anarchy that I like and need: the availability of birth control and abortion...

...In this view, the casual brutality of American pop culture—embodied in Internet pornography, video games, rap music, movies, and television shows—has created a generation of moral cretins immune to, or perhaps even delighting in, the horrors of real violence...

...The Abu Ghraib tortures were not the inevitable result of a deep dark stain in the American soul, nor of the war on terror, nor of the wars in Afghanistan or even Iraq, nor of sexual license...

...When that shame and fear are lacking, we all feel threatened...

...My point is not to defend "our" violence, evidenced by the Abu Ghraib photos, as less bad than "theirs"— and anyway, theirs and ours are mixing it up quite a bit these days—but to caution against blaming the too-easy, always available devil of pop culture when diagnosing America's ills...

...Tempting, but wrong...

...Peruvians...

...The challenge of the Abu Ghraib scandal is to fulfill this trust...

...54 • DISSENT / Winter 2005...

...So does the reelection of George W. Bush, an event so calamitous that there is a great temptation, for many of us, to simply withdraw: in anger, fear, despair, contempt, fatigue, wounded narcissism, or some combination thereof...

...more monstrous still is the high likelihood that, according to Hersh and others, upon release the alleged victims will commit suicide, or be murdered by their families, to atone for the familial shame of those rapes...

...In this country, the photographs have led to some sober reflections and impressive investigative reporting...

...SUSIE LINFIELD is associate director of the Cultural Reporting and Criticism program at New York University...

...It will do no good to look at, and critique, the ugly aspects of modernity without also looking at, and critiquing, the ugly aspects of premodernity...

...I live, as some of you may, behind a prophylactic cultural shield...

...For Rebecca Hagelin, vice president of the Heritage Foundation, Abu Ghraib is "the latest evidence of a culture gone stark raving mad...

...And Faisal al-Kasim, host of alJazeera's most popular talk show, insisted, "The U.S...

...the moral gravity of Ignatieff's book lies precisely in this bitter knowledge...

...The only less defensible thing is the culture of shame, about which much has been written in the context of Abu Ghraib...

...Special Forces units seeking to move quickly against suspected terrorist cells were compelled to get prior approval from local American ambassadors and brief their superiors in the chain of command...

...Soon after the Abu Ghraib scandal broke, Michael Young, opinion editor of Beirut's Daily Star, wrote, "There is no justification (let alone a politically expedient rationale) for a host of recent American undertakings in Iraq...

...Such clerics are being arrested all over Europe, including Spain, Italy, and France...

...What we find ourselves in is not a clash of civilizations but, rather, a dialectical, often tormented engagement between them...

...on innumerable Web sites and television programs...

...as Supreme Court justice Robert Jackson wrote in 1949, the Bill of Rights is "not a suicide pact...

...The Lesser Evil has garnered some positive responses...

...Beyond the generalities of culture, there are the specifics of politics and history that demand consideration when thinking about something like Abu Ghraib...

...so too are the Western sites that, in a wonderful example of global solidarity, post the snuff films of jihad just as soon as they're produced...

...For what they and, even more, the controversies over them reveal is not that the West is more barbaric than the East, or vice versa...

...There ABU GHRAIB was, first, President Bush's decision that the Geneva Conventions do not apply to the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay...

...The dilemma is posed in the first chapter of Seymour Hersh's book...

...Ignatieff's arguments are unusually fluid, dispensing with the rigidities of right and left...

...In his New York Times review, Ronald Steel offhandedly allowed that "To be sure, acts of terrorism against us must be dealt with"—the kind of feeble generality that only begs the questions Ignatieff at least tries to answer...

...How to define such emergencies is of course a key question...

...The Abu Ghraib tortures make this more necessary, not less...

...Can it be used against other targets too...

...Civilization isn't contingent on the hope that people will never harm each other—if it were, there would be no civilization anywhere on Earth...

...To say that one is against torture, or that the Geneva Conventions must always be upheld, or that fundamental human rights are inviolable does not, unfortunately, end the discussion about ways and means in the war on terror...

...The restoration of this trust is not a thing but a process, one in which we regain our practice of democracy...

...It will do no good to speak of our sexual pathologies and obsessions, DISSENT / Winter 2005 • 4 9 ABU GHRAIB evinced by the Abu Ghraib pictures, without also speaking of the sexual pathologies and obsessions of the Other...

...Swedes...

...both men now sit in London jails...

...On the left, they have inspired paroxysms of self-hate...

...However, there is also no excuse for denying that what we have seen in the past week in the U.S...

...Some democrats in the Arab world—they do still exist, though the fiasco of our Iraq "reconstruction" in general, and of Abu Ghraib DISSENT / Winter 2005 • 53 ABU GHRAIB in particular, has weakened them horribly— are counting on us to show what democracy in action looks like...

...Does freedom of expression—or of religion— protect the likes of Abu Hamza alMasri and Abu Qatada, Muslim clerics who exhort the faithful to fulfill their holy duty to kill Jews, secularists, and other infidels...

...In Sontag's view, photographing the torture was simply the natural extension of the image-world in which we moderns dwell: "An erotic life is, for more and more people, that which can be captured in digital photographs and on video . . . .To live is to be photographed...

...Will you accept them as necessary...

...And you wonder how much of the sexual tortures inflicted on the inmates of Abu Ghraib was inspired by the vast repertory of pornographic imagery available on the Internet...

...Among other things, the Mafia and drug cartels seek to amass profits, not to murder massive numbers of civilians, destabilize the institutions of secular democracy, or establish a transnational fundamentalist state...

...A far broader issue emerges: Is it possible to effectively fight terrorist groups without ever using extra-judicial techniques abroad or abridging liberties at home...

...and that intends to rectify matters...

...Both the Washington Post and the New York Times, however, have reported that some of the abuse occurred not in the context of intelligence interrogations but as punishment for the alleged rape of a male prisoner and a prison riot...

...it had McCarthyism...

...What is illustrated by these photographs is as much the culture of shamelessness as the reigning admiration for unapologetic brutality...

...Women in too much of the Muslim world live under conditions of terror, humiliation, and force, particularly when it comes to the most intimate sexual matters— much like the prisoners at Abu Ghraib...

...to describe any of this as the encouragement of modesty is like describing slaves as people who don't worry about unemployment...

...Such views may be highly controversial, but they are not outside the humanrights mainstream: Treaties such as the European Human Rights Convention and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights specifically allow for the suspension of many (though never all) human and political rights in times of national emergency...

...Twinned with Rumsfeld is Zizek, who also believes in an essential American soul (though he would probably condemn speculation about an Arab soul as pernicious Orientalism...

...It is a sad and scary commentary on our current political scene that it is virtually impossible for an American politician to say this—or, at least, to say it and get elected...

...WE AMERICANS join others throughout the world in looking at the images of Abu Ghraib, but we cannot pretend that they have no particular resonance for 50 n DISSENT / Winter 2005 us...

...I suppose I know what this means, though it strikes me as an awfully strange point, for I have wracked my brain to think of any "culture," or nation, or people, to whom the forcing of nudity, masturbation, and simulated oral sex onto powerless prisoners would not be considered horrific...

...all the more reason for Democrats to put up a fight...

...Conversely, it is no accident that America's greatest cultural critics, from Walt Whitman and Gilbert Seldes to James Agee, Pauline Kael, and Greil Marcus, understood the ways in which American popular forms and American fun—which is to say American freedom, spontaneity, and sensuality— are intertwined, frequently producing junk but sometimes creating invigorating works of pleasure and, even, genius...

...Does the First Amendment or lawyer-client privilege, for instance, protect radical lawyer Lynne Stewart who, as of this writing, finds herself on trial in a Manhattan court...

...In the London Review of Books—a publication whose selfproclaimed superiority to all things American grows increasingly tiresome—Zizek wrote, "The Iraqi prisoners were effectively being initiated into American culture...

...argued that American military personnel are not liable to criminal prosecution for torture...

...the open arms of diversity do not embrace death...

...AS FOR THE photos themselves, Hersh has proposed that they were taken for the specific purpose of creating a pool of inmates who could be blackmailed and, therefore, turned into informers: "It was thought that some prisoners would do anything— including spying on their associates— to avoid dissemination of the shameful photos to families and friends," he writes in Chain of Command: The Road from 9/1 1 to Abu Ghraib...

...this depresses and scares me...

...Lynndie England's mind, and heart, may well have been warped by the lazy trashiness of American popular culture...

...He writes that terrorism wreaks damage by tempting us to view our greatest strengths—including "public debate, mutual trust, open borders, and constitutional restraints on executive power"—as weaknesses...

...I am puzzled as to why they insist on the opposite when it comes to rap or MTV...

...but the Supreme Court and others exist precisely because there is vast disagreement as to what "constitutional" means...

...But the fury it has evoked in other places seems disproportionate to the measured arguments it develops, and suggests that—like Paul Berman's Terror and Liberalism, which also attracted vitriol—it is the very questions Ignatieff dares raise that rile his foes...

...This does not reduce them to instruments of political expediency...

...These are questions that, I think, many of us do not want to answer, or rather for which we have no answers—though, like Michael Moore, we'd prefer that Osama and his band of brothers weren't still at large, and that his cohorts weren't advocating murder from pulpits throughout the world...

...The question the photos pose, then, is whether we can defend and revivify our democratic process, which has been ominously feeble (though not, as some insist, dead) since September 1 1 . Viewed in this light, our task is not to downplay the undeniable viciousness of jihadist culture abroad nor to attack the "culture of permissiveness" at home...

...One Wall Street Journal columnist asked angrily, "TV can run Abu Ghraib's photos 24/7 but can't find 55 minutes for Saddam's crimes against humanity...

...The right, conversely, has grasped onto an embarrassing moral relativism, pointing to the systemic violence of the Arab regimes as a supposed counterbalance to Abu Ghraib...

...Koreans...

...But she scrutinized, also, the cultural terrain: "[M]ost of the pictures seem part of a larger confluence of torture and pornography...

...He defends such "foundational commitments" as the absolute prohibition of torture (the book was written before Abu Ghraib), and the right of all detainees to counsel and open proceedings: "No 'constitutional black holes' should be allowed to develop in a war on terror...

...For far more than a century, defenders of American morality have campaigned against mass-produced cultural forms: not just the photograph, the film, and the television but also the novel, the play, the comic book, and the 45...

...For it is abundantly clear that those who dwell outside the reach of American cultural dominance— or at least are dedicated to doing so— are not immune to the delights of the camera, or of sadism, or of combining the two...

...Moore crowed...

...Do you want to know if such tactics are used...

...AND HERE, truth to tell, I find myself in a bind...

...the Abu Ghraib photos, and the response to them, have made that abundantly clear...

...Democracy is not wimpiness...

...Angolans...

...But it will all pass...

...and that they can be, and are, gang-raped or killed to restore the "honor" of their families...

...found, astonishingly, that the president need not comply with laws passed by Congress...

...Indeed, the belief that necessity can transform any act into an ethical or at least morally neutral one is an odd kind of naivete, or perhaps narcissism...

...The second analysis also blames a culture of corruption, or what it sometimes calls the culture of permissiveness...

...Citing video DISSENT / Winter 2005 n 47 ABU GHRAIB games and the film Dazed and Confused, Sontag charged that "America has become a country in which the fantasies and the practice of violence are seen as good entertainment, fun...

...More important, he insists that while a democracy must protect individual rights, it must also protect its collective existence as a liberal democracy...

...And we need an unhysterical, non-ideological, wide-ranging debate about the terrorist risks we do (and don't) face, and the political and moral price of addressing them: a debate conducted within a constitutional and human-rights framework but not hostage to what constitutional scholar Cass Sunstein calls "'rights fanaticism,' which forbids any kind of inquiry...

...They have zipped through e-mails in the millions (billions...

...On the contrary, realistic rights constraints are more likely to be effective than unrealistic ones...

...And this being so, Ignatieff allows that, in fighting mass casualty terrorism, tactics like targeted killing of known terrorists, preventive detention of suspects, and "intensive" interrogations using "permissable duress" may become necessary...

...And all the while, the camera watches and records...

...This is an odd formulation, for it suggests that the mere fact of being American is a prophylactic against the wartime brutality that afflicts soldiers of other nations—a brutality against which the Geneva Conventions were specifically written...

...Young suggested that Iraqis "take [this experience] to the bank as they remember how Saddam Hussein promoted his torturers...

...Indeed, he argues that a terrorist threat demands a more open and more democratic government rather than a more secretive one, and insists that "democratic systems do not have to be less decisive than authoritarian ones...

...And it evinces a strange amnesia about key events in U.S...

...Look, again, at the details: at the defeated, pathetic hunch of the prisoners as they are forced to masturbate...

...oNETHELEss, it's undeniably true that America has become a noticeably _. coarser place in the past decade...

...We need better leaders but we need, even more, to be better citizens: ones who actively defend our rights rather than rely hopefully on others to do so...

...Ignatieff painstakingly puts forth the tests—including what he calls the "dignity" test, the "conservative" test, the "effectiveness" test, and the "last re52 n DISSENT / Winter 2005 sort" test—that such measures must pass...

...Yes, human rights belong to every human...

...The prisoner must please his interrogator, else his shame would be unending...

...The Washington Post titled one of its Abu Ghraib editorials "A Corrupted Culture," by which it meant the Bush administration's abandonment of the standard rules of war, codified in the four Geneva Conventions, the Convention Against Torture, and other treaties that have until recently governed our armed forces...

...Virtue should not be our main concern, which is why those who view the present political crisis as a morality play are wasting time...

...at the face, contorted in a howl of pain (or is it rage...

...he argues, further, that they can be approved only after being rigorously subjected to adversarial judicial review, and then only for strictly limited periods of time...

...But Ignatieff also argues that we cannot know the exact parameters of the peril we face—ours is a present danger, not a clear one—or might face in the future, nor can we simply wish away our enemies...

...They hang on walls all over the world, including four clean white ones in a New York museum and one of massive stone on a Tehran street, and on gravestones in Gaza City accompanied by the promise, "We Will Revenge...

...This will require far more than court-martialling Lynndie England and her friends, just as fighting Islamic fascism will require far more than capturing or killing Osama and Omar...

...In a cover story for the New York Times Magazine that was reprinted in twentytwo overseas publications, Sontag criticized what she called "the fundamental corruptions of any foreign occupation together with the Bush administration's distinctive policies...

...It would be equally costly to "outsource" such a discussion to stock phrases like "the Constitution" and "human rights," as we outsourced so much of the Iraq debate to the word "multilateral...

...presumably this, too, contravened the ethical DNA of every U.S...

...IGNATIEFF'S IDEAS have not been welcomed in all quarters...

...They can, like all photographs, be put to vastly disparate uses, and will surely be 46 n DISSENT / Winter 2005 reproduced in both the recruiting videos of terrorist groups and the fundraising pamphlets of human-rights organizations...

...Human rights are not a system of indivisible absolutes...

...Whether this is a fact or a hope remains, however, to be proved...

...The Islamist Web sites that post these horror shows—documenting, indeed advertising, the excruciating murders of Berg, of Daniel Pearl, of Kenneth Bigley, of the dozen Nepalese workers and of too many other begging, quivering prisoners—are immensely popular...

...They have appeared on the front pages of countless newspapers and magazines in East and West...

...Is the hatred of humiliation culturally contingent...

...Indeed, reports are circulating that some of the women prisoners at Abu Ghraib may have been raped by American soldiers, which if true is monstrous (the army's Taguba report alludes to one such incident...

...There were similar problems throughout the world, as U.S...

...If so, how and where...

...So it is way too late, and the stakes are way too high, to romanticize the cultural deformities of either East or West...

...The most pitiless, most graphic, most celebratory and, yes, most ABU GHRAIB lovingly photographed violence—real violence— emanating throughout the world today comes precisely from those who are expressly opposed to the lazy trashiness of American popular culture (and, not incidentally, to its fun...

...Citing the "cultural rot" that pervades the mass media, Hagelin warned, "We have been sliding down the slippery sewer of cultural immorality for so long that we don't even realize that we're covered with stinking sludge...

...The conventions, to which the United States is of course a signatory, were now "obsolete," in the words of then-White House counsel Alberto Gonzales, who has since been nominated as attorney general...

...This means that, domestically, we must battle the obscenely distended concentration of power that has accrued in the executive since 9/11 and restore the balance that our founders envisioned...

...the freedom to read, see, and write anything I want, including this article...

...Democracy corrects itself...

...I have been to panel discussions on Abu Ghraib, in New York, in which the United States was depicted as a uniquely depraved force of destruction...

...What Schneider failed to mention is that women in more than a few Muslim countries can be, and are, beaten, doused with acid, or even killed when such encouragement fails—when, that is, too much ankle or hair or face is shown...

...It was these special forces and their "unconventional methods" that, Hersh contends, would later be sent to oversee Abu Ghraib's civilian detainees...

...It is no exaggeration to say that the future depends on this: not just the future of Michael Young or of Faisal al-Kasim, but yours and mine as well...

...Is Michael Moore...