Columnists "shame" Bush Admin over abuse

The volume of articles about Guantanamo and rules for detainee treatment grew considerably in the past couple of days, with the news, as one famous columnist put it, that "President Bush, who bills himself as a 'compassionate conservative,' refuses to rule out cruel, abusive treatment of prisoners of war and detainees." Helen Thomas, an 80-something columnist, who reported decades and decades of Whitehouse activity, wrote in this same column yesterday that an independent investigation into allegations of abuse is sorely needed.

Another columnist compared the impact of torture suffered by Primo Levi, a survivor of Auschwitz, to the probably impact of detention in the Guantanamo Bay camp. Walking on eggshells, aware that these comparisons are quite sensitive, Richard Cohen of the Washington Post writes that the legacy of abuse and torture is shame, in all cases.

The purpose of the torture, aside from it mostly having none at all, was to annihilate the prisoner's sense of self. For Levi and the others at Auschwitz, it meant the loss of his identity and the replacement of his name with a number, 174517. It was an inventory tag. [...]

But it was Levi's admission of shame that got me -- shame, not guilt. He was ashamed of what had happened to him, his horrible degradation, but mostly his silence. He yelled "Yes!" when the Nazis demanded it of him, and he watched the gruesome hangings of the recalcitrant and the brave while he mostly avoided eye contact, said nothing and shamed himself with his silence.

That shame is what persists after -- way after -- the torture has been concluded and the pain is gone. That shame is what my Post colleague Pamela Constable recently invoked when she wrote about a 1990 trip through Chile, where she had once worked, interviewing torture victims. She likened what she found then to what she found much more recently in Afghanistan, her latest overseas assignment. The abusers there were Americans.