Prison abuse isn't same as torture

If you read the newspapers, watch network TV and/or listen to Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., you may think that the abuse of Iraqi prisoners by American soldiers is the same as torture. But it's not, and I'll tell you why.

According to Sen. Kennedy, Saddam Hussein's prisons have simply reopened under American management, which is an outrageous statement because it's absurd to compare the type of abuse suffered by Iraqi prisoners with the treatment that the Iraqi people endured under Saddam's brutal regime.

Let's remember that the Iraqi tyrant murdered hundreds of thousands of his fellow citizens; by contrast, a handful of American prison guards treated their prisoners badly and subjected them to indignities. Another difference is that Saddam perpetrated his atrocities with impunity for many years while the American soldiers are already being punished for their misdeeds.

A friend of mine who served on the front lines in Vietnam and saw his share of war crimes has urged me not to politicize this issue, and I'll try to follow his good advice. The behavior of American troops in Iraq is definitely not a political issue and it transcends mundane arguments between Democrats and Republicans, or between Bush and Kerry supporters.

On Wednesday, Army Spc. Jeremy Sivits, a former guard at the Abu Ghraib Prison in Baghdad, was court-martialed and sentenced to one year in jail after agreeing to testify against his fellow guards. More court martials will follow and guilty soldiers will be brought to justice. At the same time, military and congressional investigations will determine who was responsible for the abuses that took place over the past few months and those who ordered the abuses - or permitted them to take place - will be punished, as they should be.

Among those who should face military justice is Army Reserve Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, former commander of the 800th Military Police Brigade at the prison, who has already been admonished for "serious deficiencies in her brigade." She argues that she didn't know what was going on in her command, that military and civilian interrogators were in charge of prison interrogations, and that the abuses took place without her knowledge; however, none of those excuses will fly in her court martial.

While American and Arab media were having a field day with Iraqi prison abuse images, another image seared itself into our collective psyche - specifically, the unspeakably cruel and bloody beheading of American "businessman" (or unemployed job seeker) Nicholas Berg by Islamic extremists. First we saw American soldiers making fun of naked Iraqi detainees, and forcing them to wear women's underwear on their heads, and then some Web surfers watched as Islamic terrorists cut Nick Berg's head off and held it up for the camera.

Both are abhorrent (President Bush's word) images, but the Berg beheading, widely available on the Internet, defies description and far exceeds the bounds of civilized behavior. I declined to watch that horrific video but my Vietnam vet friend saw it and said it made him "think about things like freedom, evil and war in a very human way" because it put a human face on terrorism. "Nick Berg's bloody decapitation doesn't clarify or crystallize the issues," he commented. I agree and believe that it merely illustrates the outer limits of man's inhumanity to man, and shouldn't be exploited for political purposes, no matter how "just" the cause.

Nevertheless, there's a big difference between being forced to wear women's underwear, and being beheaded. Given a choice, I'd choose the underwear, as ridiculous as that might look on national television. The Abu Ghraib prison images, with grinning Americans leading naked prisoners around on dog leashes, look like something out of a bad episode of "Prison Guards Gone Wild." Fortunately, these immature, ill-trained Army reservists are about to receive a much-needed lesson in military discipline.

On the other hand, the heartless and murderous terrorists who beheaded Nick Berg for all the world to see must also be captured and brought to justice. And while the Arab and Muslim worlds were quick to condemn the American soldiers for their transgressions - and some family members of Iraqi detainees demanded the death penalty - they were much less willing to condemn barbaric acts by their fellow Muslims.

"I would like to have seen a much higher level of outrage throughout the world," said Secretary of State Colin Powell, "and especially the Arab world." Me too! But perhaps their lack of outrage is due to the fact that torture is a fact of life in that part of the world.

So let's not get trapped into moral equivalence arguments, or accept "we're just the same as they are" theories propounded by anti-war activists and a few partisan politicians. Although the prison abuses are stupid and wrong, and fly in the face of everything we believe in, we're not the same as our enemies.

We should never forget that we're in a war against terrorists who purposely target innocent civilians - including women, children and babies - in the name of their vengeful God. Although they don't play by our rules, we should never play by theirs.

Guy W. Farmer, a semi-retired journalist and former U.S. diplomat, resides in Carson City.