To the author

I assume that most everyone has by now heard about or come across the article in Friday's Washington Post by Eric Fair, who worked as a contract interrogator in Iraq in 2004.

A man with no face stares at me from the corner of a room. He pleads for help, but I'm afraid to move. He begins to cry. It is a pitiful sound, and it sickens me. He screams, but as I awaken, I realize the screams are mine. ...

Despite my best efforts, I cannot ignore the mistakes I made at the interrogation facility in Fallujah. I failed to disobey a meritless order, I failed to protect a prisoner in my custody, and I failed to uphold the standards of human decency. Instead, I intimidated, degraded and humiliated a man who could not defend himself. I compromised my values. I will never forgive myself.

At the end of the article, the Post printed his email address. For whatever it might be worth to him or anyone else, this is the email I sent to him:

I just wanted to thank you for your piece in the Washington Post. It could not have been an easy thing to write and I commend the courage it took to do so - and more, the courage to include an email address despite the vituperation I expect you will receive that way.

I don't know if it will provide any comfort to know that I suspect there are a fair number of other people who have an ache in their soul for something they did - or, as in my case, failed to do - even as their conscience demanded something else, something better, of them. But in case and to whatever degree it can, there it is.

I don't mean to equate our experiences: Your pain is clearly deeper than mine, which despite its age sometimes still haunts the isolated hours but has never caused the sort of nightmares you have had - for which I can only feel sorrow for you and, for my own selfish benefit, relief for me. I just want to reassure you that you (and I) are by no means alone in such regrets.

That, and to offer one piece of advice: You say "I will never forgive myself." Perhaps not - but you must try. You must never, ever forget - but you must try to learn how to forgive.

Yes, you failed to follow your conscience, as so desperately many of the rest of us have as well, to our regret and shame. But for whatever small solace it gives, take refuge in the fact that at least it means you have one.

Fair ended his piece by saying

[r]egardless of how many young Americans we send to war, or how many militia members we kill, or how many Iraqis we train, or how much money we spend on reconstruction, we will not escape the damage we have done to the people of Iraq in our prisons. ...

The story of Abu Ghraib isn't over. In many ways, we have yet to open the book.

True, but it goes even further: Too many of us want to forget the book was even written. We want to forget all the Abu Ghraibs, all the secret prisons, all the Bagrams, all the "extraordinary renditions," all the Guantanamos, we want to wrap them up, bag them, bury them, desperately oh so desperately pretend, desperately oh so desperately tell ourselves, that this is not us, this is not who we are, this is not what Americans do, yes it's what others do but no we're not like them, we can't be, no....

But it is us, it is what we do (and have done), we are like "them." That does not mean that as a people we are uniquely or even unusually evil except as our greater power (and therefore greater responsibility) provides for greater opportunity. But it does mean that until we as a people face up to the darkness in our national soul, not in some abstract, philosophical sense but in terms of the real effect that real policies are really having on real people, until we on a national level feel and work through the kind of shame and regret that Eric Fair is feeling and working through on a personal level, there will continue to be Abu Ghraibs, Bagrams, and Gitmos for us to urgently forget.

Footnote: I have previously "meditated" on we "shouldn't be surprised" by such atrocities.