Abu Ghraib

I mean, one of the sad things was that the, the, there's, they are absolutely convinced that the United States is engaged in a religious war against Islam.

Uh, they are outraged by some factual things that occurred, such as the prisoner abuses in Abu Ghraib in Iraq.

That was brought up to me constantly.

They were furious during the Israeli bombardment of Gaza-

It set a deadline of September 30th, and the Trump administration has followed through.

Iraq is marking the occasion with a three-day, quote, celebration of sovereignty, an end to the U.S. military presence that set off so much deadly violence there and included grave abuses like the torture of Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib and the extrajudicial killings of Iraqi civilians by private defense contractors.

Still, some in Iraq are concerned that it's a precarious time to see American troops go.

We spoke to one man from Mosul who described how his wife went blind because she was hurt by an American bullet.

They lied about that, and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis dead.

Abu Ghraib was a complete international embarrassment of the highest order.

The CIA black sites were, were torturing people, yet lecturing everybody about democracy at the same time.

And, um, they send all of these, the Dick Cheneys, the George W. Bushs, the Donald Trump, they send all of these people, these Americans, to the front lines when all of these guys take deferments, would never go serve on the front lines.

Musk.

Alex Gibney, who directed Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, he won an Oscar for his film about, uh, the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib and in Iraq, which-

Call Taxi to the Dark Side

...

Point being, the press had a strong role there.

Abu Ghraib in Iraq.

Without the press, how would we know? I mean, just on and on and on and on and on, we would exist in a Soviet-style bubble where all of a sudden you wake up one day and the system collapses, and that's kind of the arc that we're headed on.

But further...

Let me ask you finally, finally, Akbar, so what does knowing all that, and I very much agree with that analysis, what does accountability look like? Because as you would know incredibly well, having come from Pakistan, there has been almost zero accountability for any post-9-11 crimes, Iraq, Afghanistan.

Yes, there were a few low-level guards who committed crimes at Abu Ghraib, and I had no issue with those individuals being prosecuted.

They did horrible things.

But they were cogs in a machine, not to excuse their... torture of Iraqi prisoners.

Steve, um, you've done s- as we said, so much work and so much writing on, uh, Al-Qaeda, on Afghanistan, on, on this whole issue, the war on terror.

Where do you think it all started to go wrong? Because there was support for the Afghan part of this, and as Vali has said, as we kind of know, Iraq did divert, but it wasn't just that, right? It was Abu Ghraib, it was, uh, Guantanamo, it was all sorts of things.

In your mind, can you analyze how it all sort of went wrong for the United States after that?

Yes, I mean, it's a, it's a great question and a big one, but just to distill a few points.

And unfortunately, the gears of this machine exist perpetually in plain language, in scripture that a quarter of the world's population considers to be the literal word of the creator of the universe.

Nothing we did wrong in Fallujah or at Abu Ghraib or in the aftermath of World War I makes that claim false.

And no doubts about the wisdom of nation-building tell us what to do about people who can sincerely claim to love death more than we love life.

Say whatever you want about the failures of American foreign policy.