The Surprising Uselessness of the Wikileaks Iraq Documents

At the risk of posting on a stale topic --

I’ll admit up front that I have a natural bias against the disclosure of classified information. While classification can certainly be used as a government tool to hide embarrassing truths, some folks are a little too quick to assume that the release of classified documents is an inherently good thing, while giving too little thought to the trade-offs involved in such disclosures. With respect to the Wikileaks disclosures, a common refrain on the left is that the truth about the war has been hidden too long, and any risk associated with the release of these reports is justified by revealing The Truth about American perfidy in the Middle East.

Personally, I can’t help but think that the ground-breaking nature of this latest document dump has been somewhat overblown. To provide some perspective on these disclosures:

1) What they tell us about the Iraqi security forces is much less surprising than it first appears.

Below is an excerpt from The Guardian’s summary of the Wikileaks docs:

The numerous reports of detainee abuse, often supported by medical evidence, describe prisoners shackled, blindfolded and hung by wrists or ankles, and subjected to whipping, punching, kicking or electric shocks. Six reports end with a detainee's apparent death.

As recently as December the Americans were passed a video apparently showing Iraqi army officers executing a prisoner in Tal Afar, northern Iraq. The log states: “The footage shows approximately 12 Iraqi army soldiers. Ten IA [Iraqi Army] soldiers were talking to one another while two soldiers held the detainee. The detainee had his hands bound … The footage shows the IA soldiers moving the detainee into the street, pushing him to the ground, punching him and shooting him.”

Compare this to an excerpt from a 2001 State Department country report on Iraq’s human rights practices:

The Government continued to be responsible for disappearances and to kill and torture persons suspected of--or related to persons suspected of--economic crimes, military desertion, and a variety of other activities. Security forces routinely tortured, beat, raped, and otherwise abused detainees. Prison conditions are extremely poor and at times life threatening. The Government reportedly has conducted “prison cleansing” campaigns to kill inmates in order to relieve overcrowding in the prisons. The authorities routinely used arbitrary arrest and detention, prolonged detention, and incommunicado detention, and continued to deny citizens the basic right to due process.

And again to the 1999 report:

Reports suggest that persons were executed merely because of their association with an opposition group or as part of a continuing effort to reduce prison populations. The Government continued to be responsible for disappearances and to kill and torture persons suspected of--or related to persons suspected of--economic crimes, military desertion, and a variety of other activities. Iraqi military operations continued to target Shi'a Arabs living in the southern marshes. Security forces routinely tortured, beat, raped, and otherwise abused detainees. Prison conditions are poor. The authorities routinely used arbitrary arrest and detention, prolonged detention, and incommunicado detention, and continued to deny citizens the basic right to due process. The judiciary is not independent. The Government continued to infringe on citizens’ privacy rights. The Government has made use of civilians, including small children, as “human shields” against military attacks.

So what the Wikileaks documents tell us is not some profound discovery about the state of Iraqi security forces. It's hardly surprising that a country with a decades-long tradition of state repression did not yield a crop of upright civil libertarians when that repression gave way to ethnic conflict.

These reports also indicate that American forces knew about these human rights abuses and failed to adequately investigate or prevent them. If this is true, the Wikileaks disclosure is a positive good in that it pressures the Defense Department to look into whether more could have been done to curtail these abuses. In the process of doing so, however, it’s worth asking whether American forces had any feasible alternatives available at the time. As the Abu Ghraib scandal demonstrated, refusing to turn prisoners over to Iraqi forces and thereby overcrowding American detention facilities would hardly have been conducive to preventing detainee abuse.

Moreover, to the extent that Americans bore the responsibility to ensure that prisoners were treated humanely, that hardly squares with the avowed anti-war position of many Wikileaks proponents. If Americans were responsible for preventing Iraqi security forces from abusing prisoners, then, by extension, drawing down American troops seems like a recipe for more human rights violations, not fewer. Furthermore, if the American forces should have left Iraq altogether several years ago, that simply means that these abuses still would have gone on -- they just would have had even less chance of being reported. The anti-war left would do well to avoid overstating American responsibility for the actions of Iraqi security forces; otherwise it risks undermining the rationale for ending America’s involvement in Iraq.

Granted, this argument invites the inevitable rebuttal that American should not have gone to war in the first place. That is a valid point, so far as it goes. But saying so in the context of 2004-2009, once the decision to go to war had already made, smacks of closing the barn door after the horses are gone. And, more to the point, Iraqi security forces were abusing prisoners years before Americans set foot in the country. The Wikileaks disclosures bring these particular abuses to light, and that is a good thing. But the disclosures hardly reveal any systemic failing of the U.S. military or undermine the rationale for U.S. efforts to put the country back together after the decision to go to war was made.

2) What they tell us about civilian casualties is even less surprising.

According to the Wikileaks documents, there have been nearly 122,000 casualties since the start of the Iraq War. To the extent that American forces caused the deaths of innocent civilians, we must take more responsibility for the lives lost. However, that hardly proves that these casualties irrefutably demonstrate that America's presence in Iraq has been nothing but destructive.

When it comes to large populations in underdeveloped countries wiping each other out, Americans simply aren't as important as the most ardent voices on the left proclaim. This is readily confirmed by a survey of various ethnic conflicts over the last fifteen years. Prior to American intervention, the Bosnian war claimed 200,000 lives over four years; the civil war in Rwanda resulted in 800,000 dead between April and June of 1994; by some estimates, the Darfur death toll has reached nearly 300,000 since 2003.

In Iraq, a third of the civilian casualties over the last few years resulted from U.S. military action, with the mast majority caused by from Iraqi-on-Iraqi sectarian violence. Considered in isolation, this is a terrible tragedy. What's even more tragic, however, is that other nations have managed to kill far more of their citizens in far less time, and they have done so without the extra incentive of seeking control over vast oil reserves. While this does not absolve American forces of responsibility for any avoidable civilian deaths that took place on its watch, it is quite possible that the presence of American forces actually mitigated the effect of post-Saddam conflict in Iraq rather than exacerbating it.

Here again, the obvious rejoinder is that had the U.S. not removed Saddam, then Iraq would have avoided civil war altogether. Such an argument collapses upon any extensive scrutiny. A 1993 Human Rights Watch report estimated that Saddam Hussein killed 50,000 to 100,000 Kurds during the Al Anfal campaigns of 1987-1989. Estimated casualties from the eight-year war between Iran and Iraq are as high as 500,000 killed. Another Human Rights Watch report estimated that “in the last twenty-five years of Ba`th Party rule the Iraqi government murdered or “disappeared” some quarter of a million Iraqis, if not more.”

History suggests that, absent American intervention in Iraq, tens of thousands of Iraqis, if not more, would still have died -- it just would have been different Iraqis. (Although perhaps the Julian Assange believes genocide is irrelevant so long as it happens at the hands of non-Americans.)

3) They change absolutely nothing about the status quo.

As sources of history, the Wikleaks disclosure provide excellent source documents. As game-changers for the war as it stands in 2010, they mean almost nothing. American forces are drawing down in Iraq, and will continue to do so over the next year.

A common refrain is that exposure of these classified documents will inevitably result in the responsible parties being held accountable. However, to the extent that American forces were involved, the Defense Department has stated that the responsible parties have already been investigated. And to the extent that Iraqi security forces are the responsible parties, the Iraqi government is hardly more likely to punish past human rights violations now, when American oversight is diminishing, as opposed to preventing over the last several years under the eye of a much more significant American presence.

Considered as a whole, it is questionable whether the Wikileaks disclosures accomplish enough to justify the human cost of releasing classified information. What is disturbing is that Julian Assange, in his quest for disclosure and exposure in and of themselves, seem oblivious to the fact that such a trade-off exists at all.

Keeping the Guanatanmo issue alive

Several of the blogs are focusing on a recent article in Harper’s that casts doubt on government claims that three Guantanamo prisoners who died in 2006 committed suicide. Andrew Sullivan has posted several excerpts from the article:


There are now credible accounts that, far from being suicides, these deaths were either the result of serious negligence in treatment of prisoners under "enhanced interrogation" or that, quite simply, they were tortured so badly in what appears to be a secret Gitmo black site that they died. Their deaths were then covered up and faked as suicides. Like some footnote in Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's work, these suicides were nonetheless described by the military as aggressive acts of asymmetrical warfare against the U.S. Many branches of government must have been involved in such an act of torture or negligence or both, and the subsequent cover-up - from the FBI, the Justice Department, the State Department, the Pentagon and the CIA, and JSOC. The cover-up appears to have been continued by the Obama administration - a staggering surrender to pragmatism that is in fact a cooptation of evil.

As I do with most big news stories, I am trying to reserve judgment on this until I see more facts fleshed out.

The story paints a picture of “coercive interrogations” that may have resulted in the brutal deaths of three prisoners whose guilt (and, for that matter, who intelligence value) was questionable at best. My gut reaction is, “This is horrible and nightmarish, if it is true.”

I can’t emphasize that second point enough. I have never heard of Staff Sergeant Joseph Hickman (the whistleblower quoted at length in the article), Teresa McHenry (the Justice Department official who investigated Hickman’s claims), Colonel Michael Bumgarner (the Guantanamo commander in charge of the cell block where the detainees died), or, for that matter, Scott Horton; therefore, all I have to go on is this particular story.

What is important to me is that the current administration takes some decisive action to vet these claims, either to expose officials who committed war crimes or to clear the names of American military and intelligence personnel whose integrity has been called into question – whichever the case may be.

I’m not even opposed to the administration doing so quietly until other, more pressing concerns are addressed (i.e., unemployment, healthcare, etc.). Simply put, even if this story is true, I wouldn't necessarily be willing to sacrifice political capital in pursuing these allegations until the administration clears away some of the issues that affect the country as a whole. That sounds cold and pragmatic, and some might even characterize such a position as lacking in courage.

But the truth is that a full-blown investigation into Guantanamo, and the Bush administration's practices in the war on terror, is not cost-free. The fact that the likes of Sarah Palin and Dick Cheney still have an audience means that such an investigation would become heavily-politicized, and pursuing it would require a significant portion of the administration's attention. The administration could make such an investigation its top priority, but make no mistake -- other controversial policy goals would need to be sacrificed.

I don't think that the Obama administration should permanently turn a blind eye to the abuses of the Bush years. However, I find some goals to be more important than others, and issues such as healthcare, unemployment, reform of the financial sector, and energy independence matter more if the administration has to choose where it focuses its energy.

However unpalatable, the best option in the short term may be to keep the Guantanamo issue alive in the blogosphere through stories like these, and pushing for a more concerted focus when the administration is in a stronger position politically. Putting something on the backburner isn't the same as taking it off the stove.

Why the healthcare debate suggests that an effective third party would result in an impotent government

As is my wont, I’ve been following the current Senate maneuverings on healthcare, but for different reasons than partisans on either side of this particular policy debate. The difficulties that the Democrats have experienced in expanding a majority vote into a filibuster-proof supermajority present an object lesson for why a two-party system, imperfect as it may be, is likely the best method to ensure that the machinery of government will work at all. It follows that, in the absence of changes in the nature of our political discourse or government institutions (and possibly both), a robust third party would be a civic disaster.

At present, a handful of disaffected Democrats and independents have been able to force extensive changes in a bill that a majority of the legislature supported. For opponents of health care, this state of affairs is a godsend. For proponents of an effective law-making process, it is profoundly disheartening. Regardless of where one stands on the issue of healthcare itself, a minority’s ability to block the will of the majority is fundamentally at odds with how we expect a legislative body to function. Forget the fact that one might oppose healthcare reform as a matter of principle. If one swaps “healthcare reform” with “Bill X,” and Bill X is what one personally believes to be a good policy, then it is difficult to reconcile the majority-rule norms of a democratic republic with what has been going on in the Senate as of late.[1]

The striking thing is that the holdouts on healthcare reform are not members of the formal opposition. They are senators who caucus with the Democratic party. All else being equal, if one swapped Joe Lieberman and Ben Nelson with a 20-strong minority third party, securing their votes would likely be impossible (as has been the case with Republicans). And in the current environment, it is unlikely that a third party would be full of pure-hearted, principled, enlightened, commonsensical servants of the people. Instead, it would likely be the same mix of serious policymakers, self-interest crooks, and fame-seeking clowns that are pretty much the norm in any large organization, let alone a national political party. While this might act as a check on the influence of special interests in the legislative process (which is a dubious proposition at best), having more than two political parties would likely prevent many good policies from being enacted in an effort to block a few bad ones.

Some might say that is a good thing, i.e., “That government is best which governs least,” and all that pedantic nonsense. However, people who will embrace that pithy platitude as an actual principle are few and far between.[2] Instead, fine ideas about limited government are conveniently forgotten or glossed over depending on whose ox is being gored. There are big government advocates on either side of the political spectrum, with the most common examples being the left’s advocacy for strong social safety nets and the right’s preference for a robust military. So, regardless of one’s particular belief about what specifically falls within the legitimate exercise of government power, – be it universal health care, the projection of military power, gay rights, gun control, the interdiction of illegal drugs, counterterrorism – once one concedes that the government has some necessary function, then a permanently paralyzed national legislature quickly loses its academic charm.

I recognize there are those who advocate radical reforms, such as commentators who view the Senate as an anti-democratic institution and propose its abolition. Such reforms may very well be necessary. However, a third party alone is no cure to what ails us. A third party wouldn’t make our existing law-making process any more effective, and the development of a third party in the absence of any broader structural reform is likely to make the problem worse.

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[1] For those who will reflexively argue that the United States is not a direct democracy, bear in mind that I am discussing how our legislature works, not the country as a whole. And from a constitutional perspective, the dominance of the majority is the rule rather than the exception.

[2] Granted, some libertarians (little L) claim that this is exactly what they are striving for. To the extent that such true-believers exist, wishing to see a viable third party slow down the workings of government, such an act would undermine democratic values. A third-party that exists merely to paralyze the government may be the “best” from an ideological standpoint, but for a minority third party to do so is fundamentally anti-majoritarian and at odds with our underlying democratic principles.

Reaction to President Obama's Afghanistan speech

I took some time out from studying last night to watch President Obama’s address on how his administration will pursue the war in Afghanistan. Below are my reactions to his speech. Overall, I was pleased, although there were some areas I wish he had addressed in more depth, such as the details of what a “civilian surge might look like.” Overall, though, my strongest responses were to the following issues.[1]

1) Why We’re Fighting.

I appreciated that he devoted some time at the front end to review the reasons why we went to war in Afghanistan in the first place. When I read a number of pundits and commentators who advocate drawing down our involvement in Afghanistan, the underlying assumption appears to be that the war never should have been fought in the first place. While it would be unfair to lump every critic into that category, the ones who strive for a quick and simple answer to justify their positions tend to take issues that are important to consider – such as the fact that the terrain in Afghanistan makes it difficult to accomplish military operations or the fact that even justified military action may alienate or radicalize locals who oppose having foreign troops in their country toward – and convert those issues into the only ones worth considering. No decision about Afghanistan should fail to consider the difficulties and secondary consequences of military action. However to focus solely on those aspects as if they were the only ones that matters is disingenuous, as it ignores the fact that our war in Afghanistan was a direct response a group that used the territory of that country to plan and launch an attack that killed thousands of civilians. While there are any number of domestic security and diplomatic responses to prevent other attacks, the proper response to punish the group that executed that attack was to launch a war in Afghanistan in order to disrupt Al Qaeda.[2]

One area that I wish the President had emphasized more was why military action against Al Qaeda justifies military action against the Taliban. He casually shifted his focus from one group to the other and back, without clearly articulating the reasons why both are threats. One compelling reason is that the most ideologically-driven Taliban want to institute a government that keeps their country mired in the Middle Ages, restricts religious freedom, and turns women into domestic slaves. Personally, I have some trouble grasping how some of the same parties can criticize President Obama for not taking China to task over its human rights violations (or, for that matter, stridently advocate equal rights here in America), yet refuse to acknowledge that on some level, if we withdrew from Afghanistan on the basis that “the Taliban aren’t Al Qaeda,” we would effectively consign a number of Afghanis to a civil hell if the Taliban seize power again. Considering that at least some of the Aghan population have been the ones who helped us decimate Al Qaeda in that country, there is a moral commitment to those people that cannot be discarded or glossed over just to simplify the anti-war position.

The unfortunate reality is that in a world of limited resources, the fact that a group is despotic and despicable isn’t always sufficient reason to commit our own resources to rooting them out. However, on a more self-interested (and perhaps more cynical) level, the Taliban leadership could have avoided going to war with us by turning over the Al Qaeda leadership 8 years ago. As uncomfortable as it is to admit, if the Taliban turned over Bin Laden tomorrow and sincerely agreed to pursue their program through the democratic process rather than the battlefield, that actually would be a good justification for distinguishing between a war with Al Qaeda and a war with the Taliban. It is a moot point, however, because the Taliban leadership, to my knowledge, have refused to do either. In diplomacy, we pressure countries that work against us. In law enforcement, we arrest people who harbor fugitives or act as an accessory to a crime. And in Afghanistan, the mere fact that the Taliban continues to aid and abet the Al Qaeda leadership that remains in Pakistan is a good reason to continue military action. There might be other, better reasons not to continue the war, but any decision to do so should not be based on some spurious notion that since the Taliban never directly attacked America, any action against them is inherently unjustified.

I’ll take a moment to note that the president’s speech did avoid going too far in the other direction, i.e., acknowledging that to the extent there are members of the Taliban who would “abandon violence and respect the human rights of their fellow citizens,” we are willing to deal with them. The Taliban is in fact more heterogeneous than commonly depicted in the media. There are elements that belong in the “aiding and abetting camp,” and there are elements that have no real interest in protecting Al Qaeda and are aligned with the Taliban as a matter of pooling resources against common enemies. On a more fundamental level, there are probably a number of lower level leaders and fighters who are aligned with the Taliban because they want to be on the winning side in the conflict, not because they particularly care about imposing a strict Sharia law. I’m assuming that it’s these Taliban-in-name-only elements that the President wants to co-opt.

2) The costs and benefits of the 18-month deadline.

I’m sure many folks on the right will be concerned with one aspect of the President’s plan , the fact that he announced an 18-month timetable for the surge of troops in Afghanistan. The conventional wisdom on the right is that any announcement of a timetable sends the message to our enemies on the battlefield that we are in the fight for a limited amount of time, and that they need only avoid losing for 18 months. There are certainly merits to this position, but like many arguments on the left, it’s an argument that tends to oversimplify the situation in order to avoid dealing with inconvenient facts. If the world just consisted of the Americans and the Taliban/Al Qaeda on a battlefield, I would be squarely on the side of those who argue that putting any deadline on our operations is a horrendous mistake.

However, that is not the case. The situation in Afghanistan includes the Americans and NATO, the Taliban and Al Qaeda we are fighting, and the Afghanistan government and security forces. We are not just fighting for America – we are fighting on behalf of and protecting an Afghani government that some watchdog groups have ranked as the second most corrupt in the world. Because of the points I made above about the threat posed by the Taliban and Al Qaeda, I believe that, in the short run, the corruption in the Afghan government is a necessary evil in an imperfect world – while it is important to influence Hamid Karzai to operate a legitimate, modern country, that concern is secondary to our military objectives. On the other hand, to the extent that the corruption in the Karzai government makes it easier for the Taliban to maintain their presence in Afghanistan, that corruption actually subverts our military objectives. On a basic level, if the Taliban can offer security and social services in the areas they control, and the officials in Kabul are more concerned with lining their pockets than governing, then we as Americans run the risk of losing a crucial intelligence asset that actually allows us to target our enemies.

The broader implication is that we need to give the Kabul government a strong incentive to behave like a legitimate government that serves the needs of its people. While I am not well-versed enough in diplomacy to know what all the options are, it makes a certain amount of sense to say, “Shape up, or take your chances with the Taliban.” So, while there are legitimate risks to imposing an 18-month deadline, it may be the best way to balance the competing goals of showing strength to the Taliban while showing Karzai that we are also not chumps who will allow his government to continue to undermine us. It is probably not a perfect strategy, because it is not a perfect world. The fact that the Afghanistan strategy was hashed out over several months, and ultimately appears to have the support of the experts on the security side of the equation (i.e., Secretary Gates, General Petraeus, General McChrystal) at least assures me that the costs and risks of such a strategy were fully vetted rather than simplistically adopted or rejected out of hand.

In defense of the hawks, I will be disappointed if President Obama ultimately gives the timeline itself more importance than the situation on the ground. If, in 18 months, the situation has improved, but needs additional time due to unforeseen events, and there is a sufficient stake in our security to continue our involvement, then I would rather him abandon or adjust the deadline rather than embrace a foolish consistency. On this issue, both Obama’s speech and his recent history suggest that he would not adhere to the deadline to the exclusion of reality and good sense. First, the overwhelming majority of his speech was dedicated to detailing the historical background of the Afghanistan war, the threat posed by the Taliban and Al Qaeda, and our security interests involved. When it came to the issues that weigh against continuing the war (e.g., the corruption in the Karzai government), he devoted less time and addressed those subjects more obliquely.[3] That suggests that the security interest trumps the good governance-in-Afghanistan interest. Imposing a timeline isn’t nearly as big a risk as imposing a deadline that ignores reality on the ground; by signaling where his priorities lie, I’m hoping that President Obama knows the difference. Furthermore, President Obama’s track record in domestic politics suggests that his approach to deadlines is, to put it charitably, flexible. While on can argue the merits of that method, it should at least give some comfort to those who fear that the president would remain inflexible on this issue.

3) Putting it in context.

One of the reasons I voted for President Obama is that he seems to have a greater appreciation for the fact that competing priorities need to be balanced. While I don’t believe that the costs of the war alone should dictate how we fight it, I appreciate the fact that President Obama stressed that we live in a nation of limited resources, and that governing is about balancing resources in a number of areas. Too many people on the left or right are unwilling to step back and recognize that simple fact about how government should work. As an aside, I’m well aware that in a democracy, the way we make policy on a national level is for different groups to advocate their position fiercely and vigorously. I also believe that is an effective way for a democracy to function – vigorous advocacy plays an important role as a tool for getting us to the best possible outcome. Where I part company with a number of people is that I believe that, while vigorous advocates play an important role in helping us reaching the best policy, the best policy is not necessarily identical to what the vigorous advocate wants. And the best policy is the one that does the most toward accomplishing important goals while doing the least to harm other important goals.

Unfortunately, instead of accepting that reality, partisans on the left and right tend to get so caught up in their single issue that it ends up skewing their world view. Their important goal becomes the only goal worth pursuing. By that logic, anyone who advocates for a competing goal is necessarily dealing in bad faith. And that tendency is not limited to either side of the political aisle. Some of those who zealously advocate healthcare reform, when confronted with the cost, need to believe that Afghanistan is a wasteful, futile endeavor rather than accept something less than perfection. Some of those who favor the war in Afghanistan, likening it to the Herculean struggles of World War II, need to believe that spending on social programs is un-American, socialistic, and wasteful, unlike the hallowed spending on defense programs. Neither side should abandon their advocacy, but they should be willing to recognize that the job of our government is to decide what the best allocation of resources between those issues is. If thousands of Americans run the risk of dying, whether from preventable diseases or from an airplane crashing into a building, then whatever reduces that risk is, by definition, an important goal.

The bottom line principle for our government needs to be what will benefit the most Americans – not what satisfies some unquantifiable need to either indulge our altruism for the sake of altruism, or “win” a war as a matter of pride rather than security. And by signaling that he understands how these competing priorities coexist, I am reassured that the President will make a good faith effort to balance them appropriately. I can only hope that I’m correct.

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[1] I’l add, as a caveat, that I am not a subject matter expert on Afghanistan, national security, or the current state of the Afghanistan war. I strive to make myself as educated as possible, given the limited amount of time I can devote to the subject, but ultimately there will be gaps in my knowledge that bear on the conclusions I make. I welcome any additional information that I’ve overlooked in the comments. That being said, I am more inclined to listen to facts and well-reasoned conclusions rather than platitudes and half-baked analogies.

[2] I make the distinction because uber-hawks tend to believe that only military action the appropriate response to combat terrorism, and uber-doves tend to believe that law enforcement and diplomatic initiatives are the only correct tools for this problem. I tend to believe that the less costly preventive measures are preferable (so long as they work), but that there is an important retributive and deterrent value in using military action where appropriate.

[3] Granted, he did acknowledge the constraints of our resources (e.g., his focus on the financial cost of the war and the implicit acknowledgment that our military efforts rely on a strong domestic economy to underwrite them), but those issues were addressed toward the end, rather than being explicitly used to bolster the case for a timeline.

Releasing the Abu Ghraib photos is a good idea, but it would be the wrong choice

Coming on the heels of Dick Cheney’s disingenuous, absurd attempt to burnish his legacy, it’s useful to consider what the Abu Ghraib abuses meant for this country, and where the most recent Abu Ghraib photos fit into the broader discussion of how we fight against our enemies.

What happened at Abu Ghraib was a despicable blot on our country. In the grand scheme of things, it certainly wasn’t as evil as the acts carried out by some of the erstwhile victims, although it makes my skin crawl a little bit to have to weigh which is worse, sexual humiliation (as occurred at the prison) or kidnapping someone in your neighborhood drilling through their kneecaps (as at least some of the jihadists in Iraq were fond of doing). However, the fact that some of the prisoners had it coming is more of an evasion that anything else.

The practical difficulty with the “had it coming” position is the very fact that when you have a prison in a war zone, there is a real possibility that some of the prisoners may not be guilty of anything particularly heinous. Generally speaking, it’s a necessary but unfortunate consequence that in a war zone you err on the side of security – the standards of proof are lower and the risk of false positives (i.e., a non-guilty person getting locked up) are higher. I characterize this as a necessary consequence because the risks associated with a false negative (i.e., releasing a guilty person on the basis of insufficient evidence) in a war zone are also higher. (As a point of clarification, a war zone is a place where shooting is going on and bombs are going off; it is not a relatively stable suburb or city where such things are the exception rather than the rule.) Therefore, if you routinely turn a blind eye to inhumane treatment of prisoners, there are going to be at least a few who didn’t “have it coming.” If one tacitly approves of prisoner abuse because most prisoners are guilty of something awful, one should at least be forced to grapple with the question of how many potentially innocent abused prisoners it would take before the abuse becomes wrong.

Furthermore, we criticize our own people for their crimes because we, as a country, are supposed to be the better ones. If a dog pees on your rug, you clean it up; if a fully-grown adult pees on your rug, you’re probably going to file a restraining order.

While I do believe that Dick Cheney and his ilk are the cause of what happened at Abu Ghraib, I also believe the official story that what happened there was the work of lower-tier jackasses taking matters into their own hands rather than following any orders to do so. Even so, Dick Cheney’s attempt to distance his policies from the actions of “a few sadistic guards” is, in a word, bullshit. When your national leadership embraces a bunker mentality, and when your country starts being willing to sacrifice constitutional principle on the altar of fear and paranoia, it creates an environment where cruelty to perceived enemies becomes a little less unthinkable. Even if no one gave an order to abuse a prisoner, that’s beside the point. When leaders like Dick Cheney encourage their country to jump directly from “unidentified person located at a suspected terrorist safe-house” to “worst of the worst,” then those leaders ultimately bear the responsibility when the less intelligent ones among us can’t quite make fine procedural distinctions between “harsh interrogation” and sexually abusing prisoners.

Given that very real threat from rhetoric like Cheney’s, there is a persuasive argument for releasing the most recent batch of detainee photos. That argument is not that withholding the photos will prevent the public from finding out the truth of what happened, or that it allows the government to undermine the public debate. The facts of what went on at Abu Ghraib and other prisons are widely known, and to the extent that they are not, the photos are hardly going to contribute anything new. Furthermore, as the ongoing dialogue in the press, and the blogs, and the Facebook postings illustrates, it’s a reasonable conclusion that the public debate has hardly been imperiled.

Instead, releasing those photos would illustrate, in the starkest possible terms, exactly what we become when we lose sight of our principles. Violence, even when justified, takes a psychological toll on the perpetrator. We train our Soldiers and marines and law enforcement officers to use the appropriate violence necessary to defend themselves and others. What we don’t do is train them to be ruthless, amoral murderers – that would make them effective in their jobs, but it would also make them a danger to the community. I wouldn’t particularly care if a mass-murdering radical jihadist was torn apart by wild dogs. But I also don’t want those same dogs in my house. If treating our prisoners humanely is what we as a country need to do in order not to become monsters ourselves, that’s hardly a great sacrifice.

The photos would serve as a useful reminder of the risks involve in encouraging ourselves to bend the rules or toss them out altogether. Words can capture what happened at Abu Ghraib, but they are also more suited to appealing to reason. Many of those in the “pro-torture” camp have already rationalized it to the point that words alone are ineffective in changing hearts and minds. Breaking that complacency would require something that hits them at a gut level – if the photos in dispute are as graphic as has been suggested, they might be the harsh imagery that forces the Dick Cheneys of the world to reconsider their opinions.

That being said, President Obama probably made the right decision by not releasing the photos. Because while Americans would react strongly to the photos, so would the citizens of countries where American soldiers are in harm’s way on a daily basis. If those emotional reactions turn into violent riots, American soldiers will be forced to face that, not the citizens or policy-makers involved in the torture debate. Iraqi citizens, no less than American ones, are subject to very human reactions. If they see something horrible, they’re going to look for someone to blame, just like we have done. And while most of them may not translate those emotional reactions into violent demonstrations, the ones who would turn to violence probably won’t be inclined to make fine distinctions about who is responsible for what’s shown in the pictures. If they see a group of American Soldiers who look just like the guards the Abu Ghraib, rioters probably not going to care whether the ones they attack were the ones who were responsible either.

Soldiers living in Iraqi towns and trying to stabilize that country are not the ones who committed the abuses at Abu Ghraib. No one who actually committed the crimes at Abu Ghraib is being protected by the President’s decision – it’s the folks who have been doing their jobs the right way that we’re concerned about. By and large, they are fundamentally decent men and women, doing the job that they were ordered to do, under circumstances that pose constant threat to their lives. While it’s true that these service members have agreed to put themselves in harm’s way by virtue of their service, the fact that they are willing to die does not give anyone the right to risk those lives needlessly.

For those of us who are trying to push back against the Cheney mentality, the photos would be a great tool. But if using that tool means that an American Soldier has to die – or worse, has to fight back with lethal force against an enraged group of Iraqis – then the human cost of our public debate is too high.

One should always look askance at a government decision to withhold information based on claims of a security risk. Claiming that the free flow of information is too dangerous is a time-tested tool of oppressive governments, who use it as a sham to avoid legitimate criticism of their decisions. That technique has been used so often, in fact, that we are sometimes unwilling to admit that any government decision to withhold information from the public could be grounded in a legitimate security concern. In this particular case, looking at all the circumstances, the President deserves the benefit of the doubt, especially when he very publicly changed his decision after consultation with military leaders. While the military, like any other profession, is not immune to covering its collective ass, that fact alone, without more, doesn’t show that they are fabricating a security threat in this case.

For many, that’s probably an unsatisfactory answer. Unfortunately, it’s not a perfect world – while we shouldn’t trade our security for our liberty, we also shouldn’t force good people into harm’s way by disclosing the photos just for the sake of disclosure.