Abu Ghraib and Salon

By continuing to publish documentation of the abuse, we hope to shed light on a chapter in American history that this administration has tried to keep in the shadows.

By Joan Walsh

Simply put, the cartoons are not being suppressed on the Web -- in fact, they're easy to find. Were they to disappear tomorrow thanks to some campaign or censorship, we'd have to seriously consider making them available on Salon, given their news value. For now, that's not the issue.

There's something essentially wrong about equating the Mohammed cartoons and the Abu Ghraib photos, anyway. The former are Op-Ed pieces commissioned by editors; the latter are images of actual events. We can and do condemn the hate and violence the cartoons provoked. But as Americans we are directly complicit in the violence that took place at a prison run by the American military. It is our story in a way that Danish cartoons can never be.

As Walter Shapiro argued so movingly in his piece explaining why we ran the photos, the point is not merely that Americans tortured these prisoners in our custody; the point is that our military personnel went to such great lengths to capture the humiliation on camera. It's a double violation, a double humiliation (and it's why we took care to obscure the identities of any victims whose faces were visible).

Abu Ghraib matters severely. It will go down in history as a terrible humiliation for our democracy, for our ideas about the rights of individuals and the responsibilities of conquering armies. For a brief scarring moment in 2004, just a few weeks really, we had a national crisis over Abu Ghraib. But after a short period of time, the pathologically secretive Bush administration announced the controversy was over, everyone was free to go back to what they were doing, there was nothing to look at here, move along.

A handful of low-level military personnel were indeed prosecuted; but the leaders of the prison and of the interrogation project never faced charges. And meanwhile, we learned from our leaders: Oh, by the way, there were many more photos, cataloged by the Pentagon and shared with some congressional leaders. But they weren't fit to be seen by the American public. So the government hid them away, and continues to do so -- despite losing in federal district court to a suit by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Constitutional Rights seeking release of the images.

But what about the argument that publishing more evidence of Abu Ghraib abuse simply incites further violence against American targets? As an American news organization, we do not believe we should make decisions about censoring discussion and debate of our government, and our military, based on fear of extreme Muslim reaction. As Federal District Court Judge Alvin Hellerstein wrote in a decision in favor of the ACLU and CCR suit, rejecting administration arguments that the images would inflame terrorists: "Terrorists do not need pretexts for their barbarism."

Now Salon, we believe, has the archive the ACLU and CCR have sought. We face a series of decisions about what, if anything, further to do with it. We definitely intend to publish a significant amount of additional material in the near future. But we have also rejected the notion of a quick and dirty dump of the contents to the Web. Some significant portion of the documents we possess does not appear to relate at all to prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib, and we can see no public interest served by publishing it.

So sticking with the bar we established for ourselves earlier this week, we will, at minimum, continue to work with the photos -- brand new and already published -- for which we can find documentation in the CID report, those we know the Army already found were evidence of abuse and/or torture. There are several disturbing videos we will attempt to hold to the same standard. Our staff will continue its reporting efforts to determine the legal, political and journalistic implications of those images. We will work to provide accurate and useful captions for whatever we publish.

We know we'll publish more, but we don't know how much we'll publish, and we don't know exactly when. We may disappoint those who think we should post everything to the Web and let readers sort out their meaning. But to us, that seems an abdication of responsibility. If you come to the Abu Ghraib archive at Salon -- we have one, and it will grow -- you will have a sense of confidence that you understand the images and the stories behind them.

To people who say this should have been over in the spring of 2004, when CBS and the New Yorker first published disturbing images of torture, let me say, I agree. At that point, our government could have said, "Yes, we have many more of these disturbing photos, and here they are. Let's stare at them and feel grief and outrage and decide as a nation that this was a terrible breach of everything we stand for. Let's figure out the chain of command that led to this abuse. Let's go beyond punishing the low-level service members who participated. Let's uncover the institutional decisions that led to this depravity. Let's examine whether higher-ups imposed policies for aggressive interrogation that countenanced such appalling behavior."

Had the Pentagon and the White House done all that, maybe this would have been behind us almost two years ago. But of course, they didn't. This is an administration known for obsessive, scandalous secrecy; Abu Ghraib is just one point on a long continuum of cover-ups. As we create an Abu Ghraib archive, we will aim to shed light on what the administration has determined to keep dark. In giving the American electorate the information it needs, we'll try to provide some of the transparency our government has so sorely lacked.

We'll do our job with integrity and diligence. That, of course, takes time. So thanks for your patience and your trust.

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