The words “Abu Ghraib”
have become synonymous with torture, a black eye for America that has damaged
US national security. Donald Trump’s policy
of ripping children away from their parents at the border is a new black mark
on America that could also undermine US national security.
America’s power comes
from its values: freedom, the rule of law, respect for human rights. Whatever
problems America may face at home, America’s democratic system enables itself
to correct wrongs in the pursuit of a fair, just society. Whatever mistakes the
United States makes in its foreign policy, America still endeavors to infuse
its foreign policy with these values. When America does not live up to these values,
it is less safe. The experience of the
Iraqi prison Abu Ghraib is instructive. After the United States invaded Iraq in
2003, it used Saddam Hussein’s jail as a place to torture Iraqi prisoners. The
torture of prisoners – the picture of a US soldier holding a naked Iraqi on a
leash, for instance – became international symbols that shattered America’s
image as a global defender of human rights.
These illegal acts
hurt US national security. Abu Ghraib was used as a rallying cry by terrorist
groups who were fighting American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. As one US
military interrogator wrote:
“I learned in Iraq that the No 1 reason foreign fighters flocked there to fight
were the abuses carried out at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo … The number of US
soldiers who have died because of our torture policy will never be definitively
known, but it is fair to say that it is close to the number of lives lost on
September 11, 2001.”
Today, America is in a
moral crisis as its government takes children away from undocumented migrants
and asylum-seekers at the US border. It is difficult to imagine something
crueler than taking a child away from parents. These people are often fleeing
violence and danger and are in search of a better life. The sounds of children
crying in US jails while guards crack
jokesare eerily evocative of US guards at Abu Ghraib posing smiling
for pictureswith
naked Iraqi prisoners in humiliating positions. As George Takei – who
was imprisoned by the US government in an internment camp as a child during the
second world war – pointed
out, not even those Japanese-Americans imprisoned during the war were
separated from their parents. In America today, border agents reportedly
told parents their children were getting bathed and then never came
back, evoking Nazis taking away children in death camps and telling people
being led to the gas chambers that they were going to take a shower... read more:
ghraib
