Alumni Association Home > Minnesota Magazine > Past Issues > 2007 > July-August 2007

When the photograph of naked Abu Ghraib prisoners wearing sandbags on their heads and organized into a “dog pile” surfaced three years ago, I looked away. It wasn’t seeing the humiliated men that made me flinch; it was the grinning prison guards, presumably the choreographers of the scene, that so disturbed me.

But the media eventually moved on to something else and so did I. Perhaps I hoped the photos that came to light were isolated incidents or that reasonable explanations lay behind them. At any rate, I did nothing about them, other than ultimately to replace my outrage with a sense of futility.

Medical ethicist Steven Miles (M.D. ’76), on this magazine’s cover, didn’t look away. He looked wider and deeper. You’ll read his words about the complicity of U.S. medical doctors in the abuse of prisoners beginning on page 18.

I was wrapping up my second interview with him for our article when I recalled something he’d said last fall in an interview for another publication. He had mentioned that he was planning to write about the abuse of child prisoners in U.S. custody in Iraq and Afghanistan and at Guantanamo Bay, so I asked if he still planned to do so. I hadn’t heard much about children anywhere else.

“I did put together an article on the kids,” Miles replied, “and I shopped it around but I couldn’t sell it. And I’ve highlighted a kid’s death in the archive [in the University of Minnesota’s online Human Rights Library], and that didn’t go anywhere either. For some reason, the media and the public are not yet ready to look at the full human face of the tragedy that we’ve had.”

I asked if he’d be willing to send his article to me.

It’s a short piece and—unlike his academic writing—rather impassioned. It’s a devastating account of seven incidents, including, as an Army specialist testified to Congress, that of an Iraqi prisoner’s 16-year-old son who was “stripped, doused with mud and water, and driven in an open truck around the prison yard on a cold winter night so that the suffering boy could be displayed to his father who was under interrogation.”

“This is not about the war,” Miles had said earlier, referring to his book Oath Betrayed: Torture, Medical Complicity, and the War on Terror and the subsequent archive. “This is about simple transparency of government operations, which is the essence of what our government is about.”

In his book, Miles noted that many friends and acquaintances expressed concern that his probing into the torture documents endangered his life. Such fear fosters silence, he wrote: “It takes little more than the courage to be inconvenienced to speak against torture in the United Sates. If we are at risk of worse, then it is even more necessary that we speak out.”

I understood what Miles meant about not wanting to look this full in the face. But it was too late; I’d read the child-prisoner article, more than once. And now that I’d seen it, I wondered, would I be complicit in the abuse of these children if I looked away?

Yes, I believe I would. I reason that people will never want to look upon such wretchedness but that they’re obligated to look anyway—and to be outraged, and to demand that the abuse stop and that the guilty be held accountable.

Miles has agreed to allow us to post the full child-prisoner article on our Web site (go to www.alumni.umn.edu/StevenMiles).