CHEW ON THIS

Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba, who wrote the Army report on torture of Iraqi prisoners, is an American hyphenate. He is NOT white. He is a Filipino-American, born in Manila, who moved to Hawaii at age 11 and grew up there in a largely mixed-race society. I'd bet this made him sensitive to issues of racism that often sail right over the heads of many white Americans. Why is this relevant? Because unspoken racism seems to me to have been a factor in what happened at Abu Ghraib.

See Luc Sante's article this morning on the op-ed page of The New York Times. Sante, an authority on the history of photography, notes the similarity of the torture photos at Abu Ghraib to old lynching photos of African-Americans. He calls both kinds of photos "trophy shots." Sante writes: "Like the lynching crowds, the Americans at Abu Ghraib felt free to parade their triumph and glee not because they were psychopaths but because the thought of censure probably never crossed their minds."

I would venture that Taguba's experience as a Filipino-American immigrant with a special sensitivity to racism had as much to do with the depth of his report as his courage in bucking the system. No less important: Taguba's father, while serving in the U.S. Army during World War II, was captured by the Japanese in Bataan in the Philippines and was a prisoner of war until his escape during the infamous Bataan death march. You can be sure that his POW experience, too, focused his son's attention.

Postscript: The scathing editorial in the Army Times about "the now-infamous pictures and [Taguba's] even more damning report" gets things right: A failure of leadership at the highest levels. Apparently the enlisted soldiers involved in the scandal have come in for derision at the Pentagon as "the six morons who lost the war." But according to the Army Times "the folks in the Pentagon are talking about the wrong morons." We all know who the right morons are. "This was a failure that ran straight to the top."