Whither Abu Ghraib?

We finally made it through three debates, with a 3-0 sweep for Kerry (which has pretty much never happened before, that a challenger wins three straight debates decisively, yet it gets a great big ho-hum from the media). And yet one of the biggest issues of the last four years was left on the cutting room floor: the prisoner abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib. In May there was nothing but talk about this; in election season, none. There have been revelations about torture memos in the Department of Defense and the White House, there has been the September release of Chain of Command by Seymour Hersh, which implicates the highest levels of government in not only Abu Ghraib but dozens of US-run prisons around the world, and yet, not a peep from the Kerry campaign. It almost seems like there is a concerted effort to forget it. Today, the WaPo editorial board remembers:

IN THE PAST few weeks the presidential candidates have debated almost every aspect of the war on terrorism save one: the handling of detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan. That is a remarkable omission, if only because the shocking photographs of abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, and reports of hundreds of other cases of torture and homicide in Iraq and Afghanistan, have done grave damage to the United States' ability to combat extremism in the Muslim world.

Mr. Bush is obviously eager to avoid the subject of prisoner detentions. Maybe that's because his public stance on what happened at Abu Ghraib, and what caused it, is entirely at odds with the facts brought out by official investigations. When he last spoke of the matter, months ago, the president maintained that the abuse was the responsibility of a few low-ranking soldiers working the night shift. He has not acknowledged that scores of soldiers have now been implicated for crimes including homicide, or that a Pentagon-appointed panel has found responsibility at senior levels of the Pentagon, the Justice Department and the White House. Nor has he held anyone in his administration accountable.

Yet Mr. Kerry, who has devoted much of his campaign in the past month to criticizing how Mr. Bush has handled the war, has barely mentioned Abu Ghraib. A couple of months ago the Democrat said he felt "revulsion" over the prisoner abuses (Mr. Bush has said the same) and called for Mr. Rumsfeld's resignation. What he hasn't said is whether he accepts or rejects the policy decisions that led to it -- most importantly, Mr. Bush's contention that some detainees captured abroad should not be treated according to the standards of the Geneva Conventions but instead can and should be subjected to harsh treatments long rejected by the U.S. military.

Why is this not an issue? Exactly what is Kerry afraid of by bringing this up? Anyone who would take a torturer's side in this argument isn't voting for Kerry anyway. Normal, rational, law-abiding people look at Abu Ghraib and are repulsed. And if they knew more, like the fact that Abu Ghraib was not "a few bad apples" but policy, they'd be more repulsed.

Furthermore, as Sy Hersh and others have said, Abu Ghraib was a turning point in the "war on terror". It further radicalized the world, diminished US standing among nations, undercut our moral authority, and ceded a major victory to Islamic fundamentalists, allowing them to prove that this is a clash of civilizations. In other words, Abu Ghraib made us less safe.

Does Abu Ghraib release a kind of cognitive dissonance among the electorate, who refuse to believe that America could do something so repugnant, and would therefore lash out at the accuser rather than the perpetrator? Maybe, but I think that there are some habits that are hard to break, and the public silence on Abu Ghraib reminds me of the Democratic silence throughout 2002. The Kerry camp does not want to be bashed over the head as a military-hating peacenik. That's where we've come in America; speaking out against torture is unpatriotic.