Have things really gotten that bad? →
U.S. government is cruel, despotic, a threat to people →
U.S. torture policy →
Abu Ghraib in particular
According to sealed charging papers that were provided to The Washington Post, soldiers forced prisoners to lie in “a pyramid of naked detainees” and jumped on their prone bodies, while other detainees were ordered to strip and perform or simulate sex acts.
In one case, a hooded man allegedly was made to stand on a box of MREs, or meals ready to eat, and told that he would be electrocuted if he fell off.
In another example, the papers allege, a soldier unzipped a body bag and took snapshots of a detainee’s frozen corpse inside.
Several times, soldiers were photographed and videotaped posing in front of humiliated inmates, according to the charges.
One gave a thumbs-up sign in front of the human pyramid.
The pictures, which were obtained by an American TV network, also show a dog attacking a prisoner…
Colonel Jill Morgenthaler, speaking for central command, told the Guardian:
“One contractor was originally included with six soldiers, accused for his treatment of the prisoners, but we had no jurisdiction over him.
It was left up to the contractor on how to deal with him.”
She did not specify the accusation facing the contractor, but according to several sources with detailed knowledge of the case, he raped an Iraqi inmate in his mid-teens.
Before condemning U.S. abuses at the prison, Bush praised his decision to remove of Saddam.
“There are no longer torture chambers or rape rooms or mass graves in Iraq,” he said.
“It’s war, and war is not always fair and its not always pretty,” said Adrienne Ottaviani, a Cumberland resident and former Allegany County commissioner.
“It was the ugliness of war that we saw.
But I don’t think any of them should go to jail for this.”…
“I’m sure there is more than one side of the story, and we don’t know all the facts,” said Robert Hutcheson, a Cumberland resident and Allegany County commissioner.
“In my mind, this is no blemish on their record.”…
“The little bit I have read about, it seems to me that it is being completely blown out of proportion,” said Roger Krueger, who served in Vietnam and is the [Vietnam Veterans of America] chapter’s president.
“When a person is in combat, they have to do whatever they have to do to stay alive.”
They were not flattering pictures, and I hope they disappear into the ether and get pushed aside by bigger news in Fallujah.
If they are shown on Al Jazeera, it makes us look bad.
I am a vet. What our troops do to win this war is their business.
Things are happening over there so that we can remain free.
All they ask of us is our respect. They have mine.
Amnesty International has received frequent reports of torture or other ill-treatment by Coalition Forces during the past year.
Detainees have reported being routinely subjected to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment during arrest and detention.
Many have told Amnesty International that they were tortured and ill-treated by US and UK troops during interrogation.
Methods often reported include prolonged sleep deprivation; beatings; prolonged restraint in painful positions, sometimes combined with exposure to loud music; prolonged hooding; and exposure to bright lights.
Virtually none of the allegations of torture or ill-treatment has been adequately investigated by the authorities.
I caught a bit of the BBC World Service on National Corporate Radio this morning, and was struck by the Beeb’s heavy-duty coverage of the war crimes committed at the once-again-infamous Abu Ghraib prison.
They interviewed the CBS correspondent in Baghad, a former UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, and a British academic expert on war crimes, and described, in great detail, the specific acts captured in the photos.
The Beeb news reader also cited a wave of revulsion sweeping across what we might jokingly refer to as the civilized world.
Even Tony Blair is appalled, apparently.
This made me curious to see how my local paper was handling the story.
So I retrieved the paper from the yard, sat down on my front steps and looked at page one.
There was nothing. Page two and three? Nothing.
The “world in brief” column? Nothing.
Finally, back on page A-16 or whatever, I found a short piece (without any of the photographs, naturally) that focused on the reactions of the families of the accused torturers.
Some follow-up about ’s stories about abuse of prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison.
The story to read is Seymour Hersh’s New Yorker article.
Excerpts:
A fifty-three-page report, obtained by The New Yorker, written by Major General Antonio M. Taguba and not meant for public release, was completed in .
Its conclusions about the institutional failures of the Army prison system were devastating.
Specifically, Taguba found that there were numerous instances of “sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses” at Abu Ghraib.
This systematic and illegal abuse of detainees, Taguba reported, was perpetrated by soldiers of the 372nd Military Police Company, and also by members of the American intelligence community.
(The 372nd was attached to the 320th M.P. Battalion, which reported to Karpinski’s brigade headquarters.)
Taguba’s report listed some of the wrongdoing:
Breaking chemical lights and pouring the phosphoric liquid on detainees; pouring cold water on naked detainees; beating detainees with a broom handle and a chair; threatening male detainees with rape; allowing a military police guard to stitch the wound of a detainee who was injured after being slammed against the wall in his cell; sodomizing a detainee with a chemical light and perhaps a broom stick, and using military working dogs to frighten and intimidate detainees with threats of attack, and in one instance actually biting a detainee.
…The 372nd’s abuse of prisoners seemed almost routine — a fact of Army life that the soldiers felt no need to hide.
On , at an Article 32 hearing (the military equivalent of a grand jury) in the case against Sergeant Frederick, at Camp Victory, near Baghdad, one of the witnesses, Specialist Matthew Wisdom, an M.P., told the courtroom what happened when he and other soldiers delivered seven prisoners, hooded and bound, to the so-called “hard site” at Abu Ghraib — seven tiers of cells where the inmates who were considered the most dangerous were housed.
The men had been accused of starting a riot in another section of the prison.
Wisdom said:
SFC Snider grabbed my prisoner and threw him into a pile… I do not think it was right to put them in a pile.
I saw SSG Frederic, SGT Davis and CPL Graner walking around the pile hitting the prisoners.
I remember SSG Frederick hitting one prisoner in the side of its [sic] ribcage.
The prisoner was no danger to SSG Frederick… I left after that.
When he returned later, Wisdom testified:
I saw two naked detainees, one masturbating to another kneeling with its mouth open.
I thought I should just get out of there.
I didn’t think it was right… I saw SSG Frederick walking towards me, and he said, “Look what these animals do when you leave them alone for two seconds.”
I heard PFC England shout out, “He’s getting hard.”
…In letters and e-mails to family members, Frederick repeatedly noted that the military-intelligence teams, which included C.I.A. officers and linguists and interrogation specialists from private defense contractors, were the dominant force inside Abu Ghraib.
In a letter written in , he said:
I questioned some of the things that I saw… such things as leaving inmates in their cell with no clothes or in female underpants, handcuffing them to the door of their cell — and the answer I got was, “This is how military intelligence (MI) wants it done.”… MI has also instructed us to place a prisoner in an isolation cell with little or no clothes, no toilet or running water, no ventilation or window, for as much as three days.
The military-intelligence officers have “encouraged and told us, ‘Great job,’ they were now getting positive results and information,” Frederick wrote.
“CID has been present when the military working dogs were used to intimidate prisoners at MI’s request.”…
In , Frederick wrote, an Iraqi prisoner under the control of what the Abu Ghraib guards called “O.G.A.,” or other government agencies — that is, the C.I.A. and its paramilitary employees — was brought to his unit for questioning.
“They stressed him out so bad that the man passed away.
They put his body in a body bag and packed him in ice for approximately twenty-four hours in the shower… The next day the medics came and put his body on a stretcher, placed a fake IV in his arm and took him away.”
The dead Iraqi was never entered into the prison’s inmate-control system, Frederick recounted, “and therefore never had a number.”
An encouraging number of bloggers and commenters are making the good point that the American domestic prison system is also one in which torture and extrajudicial execution is, if not commonplace, certainly practiced and with near-impunity.
Hersh notes in his article:
[Sergeant] Frederick, at thirty-seven, was far older than his colleagues, and was a natural leader; he had also worked for six years as a guard for the Virginia Department of Corrections.
A lot of people are noticing the allegations that some of the interrogations were carried out by “private contractors,” one of whom, as was mentioned in yesterday’s Picket Line, is accused of having raped an Iraqi boy in custody — but is not being prosecuted because nobody seems to have or want jurisdiction.
Phil Carter of Intel Dump shows how this could happen.
Apparently “[t]he Coalition Provisional Authority has decreed that contractors and other foreign personnel will not be subject to Iraqi criminal processes.”
The military doesn’t have jurisdiction over these contractors either.
And while the U.S. Justice Department could decide to step in, in practice it doesn’t. Gee, hasn’t anybody thought of declaring them “unlawful combatants?”
“Armed Liberal” over at Winds of Change leads the pack of liberal hawks putting on rose-colored glasses over the credulous doe-eyes that got ’em this far.
United States troops caught on film abusing Iraqi prisoners?
What’s not to love?:
As others point out, though, the allegations of torture against the United States in Afghanistan, Guantánamo and Iraq keep piling up — and the United States is blocking the sort of transparency, oversight or even training that might help prevent abuses from happening (if the abuse were not in fact sanctioned by policy).
The “Armed Liberal” camp will allow themselves to believe that abuse is going on only up to the point where the photographic evidence doesn’t allow them to deny it.
And so long as what cannot be denied is appropriately punished, or at least some of it is, or is investigated, sternly, well then, doesn’t that prove to our own satisfaction that we’re good?
Why should we condemn or stop what we can effectively prevent ourselves from learning about in the first place?
If Frederick and these other soldiers are punished, they will know very well that their crime was in being stupid enough to let the photos leak and that if they’d stuck to abusing and humiliating prisoners they’d still be able to expect to come home to a hero’s welcome from folks like “Armed Liberal.”
The Los Angeles Times published excerpts from the Army’s investigation of abuse of prisoners in Abu Ghraib.
The official Best Possible Spin is in.
The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, despite having not read the Army investigator’s report describing the abuse, said “categorically” that “there is no evidence of systematic abuse” and blamed the scandal on “just a handful” of abusive guards whose actions “besmirch maybe the reputations of hundreds of thousands.”
Fafblog summarizes:
The activities that occurred at Abu Ghuraib prison are not to be compared to those of Saddam Hussein’s rape rooms and torture chambers.
After all, those were rape rooms and torture chambers.
These were merely rooms in which rape occurred, and chambers in which individuals were tortured.
In war, atrocities will happen, as dew on the grass in the morning, or flower blossoms in the spring.
The dew gathers. The buds open. The atrocities bloom.
It is all according to the mysterious, ever-unfolding cycle of life — a cycle too vast and complex for mere mortals to comprehend.
These were isolated incidents, and the behavior of these prison guards should in no way reflect upon the military superiors who endorsed and promoted such behavior.
This is because atrocities are supervenient on subordinates, but not on command structures.
Those with greater learning will understand.
What sort of conclusions do I mean to draw from this ongoing chronicle of badness?
Certainly not “look! here’s proof that this war is brutal!”
I agree that in the context of the reign of Saddam and the brutality of the invasion of Iraq, the torture and humiliation of a handful of prisoners is a footnote.
Not to the prisoners themselves, of course, but the same can be said of the victims of so many other footnotes and those who will remain uncited even there.
This is a war in which Americans deliberately and rationally shot ten-year-olds (for very good reasons) and bombed residential neighborhoods (for very good reasons).
Were U.S. personnel torturing and humiliating Iraqi prisoners, perhaps for very good reasons?
Did we have to see pictures to know?
Rest assured, though, that appropriate reprimands and admonishments will be meted out now that official denial is no longer an option.
I’m going to try to stop with my detailed updates of the Abu Ghraib story here at The Picket Line — if you want to follow the story, I recommend Whiskey Bar a.k.a. Billmon, but in truth there’s good commentary and investigation all over blogland.
I won’t be leaving the story behind entirely, since it is turning out to be a good window on the issues of complicity, responsibility and willful ignorance that I bring up here regularly.
But I’m heartened to see that many of these angles are being pursued energetically and well by others, and so I’m going to hold off until I’m confident I’ve got something to say that’s tightly focused and not redundant.
One perennially-tempting metaphor that’s been tempting me more than usual lately is the one that compares a nation to a person.
In some ways the United States today is behaving like a person faced with an accusation of wrongdoing.
The United States has a public image to protect, as well as a self-image to defend (Dubya’s “the America I know”), an eagerness to sweep its misbehavior under the rug, and a proliferation of storylines it tries out when conflicts between these images and reality come to the surface.
This suggests at first that, to the extent that this anthropomorphization metaphor is worthwhile, the United States is not psychopathic or infantile — it has a conscience and a far-from-well-developed ethical instinct, which is one step up from having no conscience at all.
On the other hand, even the psychopath will start coming up with a bouquet of justifications if he is caught, sounding for all the world as if he really cared.
So it’s worth noticing that the corresponding bouquet of shocked and disgusted Senators only went on display because photos of the abuse in Abu Ghraib made denial of the obviousimpossible.
For the purpose of argument, though, let’s let hope rule: There is a respectable public murmur of consternation even over those of our misdeeds that we could plausibly deny, and if our metaphor holds, we can call this evidence of a collective conscience.
So if this metaphor is going to be a helpful one, we next need to figure out how a person goes from being a psychopath, to being concerned with justifying her behavior by lying to herself and others, to being someone who fully owns her behavior and whose self-image matches her actual motivations and actions.
(Or maybe it makes more sense to look at how ethical development takes place in children.)
Then we can see if there is anything from this we can apply to the nation, using the metaphor as guidance, that seems like it would do any good.
I haven’t gotten much further along this path.
My instincts tell me that instead of getting useful it will just get more and more speculative and science-fictionish.
I can’t imagine that there’s a good “cell’s-eye” view story of how to reform the ethics of a body — and that’s what you and I are, right: cells in the body politic?
Are we just individually to try to become stronger voices of conscience, shouting louder than the justifications and the denial?
I don’t know that this would be helpful.
After all, Joe Lieberman and Christopher Hitchens see themselves in this lonely moral prophet mode too.
It seems that such people are as likely to come up with more cleverly-worded justifications as they are to cut through them.
The metaphor does suggest a reason why reasoned arguments have been unable to stop the war, and why the collapse of the premises of the reasoned arguments that we rode to war on didn’t stop or discredit it.
If you want to litter, or cheat on your spouse, or pad your résumé or whatever, but you don’t want to own up to having these sinful desires, you try out justifications and redefinitions and denials and such until you find the best of the bunch.
You hold onto one, but if it gives way that doesn’t really matter since there are more to choose from, and you weren’t really attached to the justification so much as to the behavior.
So if the metaphor holds here, it suggests that America didn’t so much want to protect itself from weapons of mass destruction, it didn’t so much want to prevent Saddam from conspiring with Al Qaeda to attack us or sending nukes to North Korea, it didn’t so much want to save the oppressed prisoners in the rape rooms of Abu Ghraib.
What it really did want was to invade Iraq — either for reasons it didn’t want to acknowledge, or just because — and those were the best excuses it could come up with.
(So the story would go like this: Why did America go to war in Iraq?
It wasn’t for reasons but because America was angry.
It had just gotten sucker-punched by Al Qaeda in New York and it tried to hit back but just ended up kind of flailing away at Afghanistan which wasn’t very satisfying.
And it still kind of bore a grudge against Iraq since a decade before.
Why? did America attack Iraq — do you ask why a spouse abuser beats a spouse?
No.
You just try to stop the abuse and encourage other ways of coping with anger and frustration.)
I’m bringing all this up not because I think this metaphor can support all of the weight I’m putting on it, but just because speculations like this have been suggesting themselves to me lately.
It’s as silly to blame a handful of sadistic prison guards as it is to blame the Secretary of Defense.
No — the problem goes all the way to the top.
It doesn’t stop at Dubya, but at the country that permits him to be the Commander-in-Chief and Hider of Things We’d Rather Not Know.
More and more, the part of my brain that interprets the behavior of individual people is lighting up when it tries to integrate and synthesize what it learns about the behavior of the U.S. as a nation.
Sometimes these intuitions are false alarms that mislead, other times they’re helpful, and in this case it’s probably a mixed bag.
I’m noticing that people who used to support the war and now don’t are going through this middle-stage of stepping from plausible reason to new plausible reason as each old one burns behind them.
Each reason is a little worse than the last one, and so at each stage a handful of people bail out — “I was for the war until…” until I found out there were no weapons of mass destruction, until I realized that Dubya was as inept as he sounded, until all of Colin Powell’s fairy tales dissolved into pixie dust, etc.
The saddest of these have been the people who were for the war, but only the good parts, and now that the war has actually come to pass, with all of its bad parts, they’re against it (or are starting to lean that way).
They were all for deposing the dictator, bringing democracy, removing a threat, ushering in a new era of representative government in the region and all that.
And that’s why they supported the war.
But they never wanted the “transfer tubes,” mass civilian casualties, photographs of American sadists in action, chaotic clashing warlords, regional instability, deficit spending, military overreach, red-white-and-blue gulags and all that.
Who knew that war is a package deal?
The last great plank on this burning bridge of reasons to keep our troops fighting in Iraq (or, as Kerry would dissent, to send even more troops in) is that we can’t leave now — we’ve got to fix what we’ve broken.
If we just cut-and-run, bad things will happen — chaos, civil war, bloodshed.
Once again, Seymour Hersh at The New Yorker has got the goods.
While the rest of us have been speculating about how the contempt for the Geneva Conventions shown by higher-ups in the Bush administration led to the abuses at Abu Ghraib, Hersh has tracked down the actual step-by-step cause and effect.
It’s more direct than you might have suspected.
(Update: The Pentagon denies it but this seems to be one of those denials where only an exaggerated straw-man version of Hersh’s story is being denied:
“No responsible official of the Department of Defense approved any program that could conceivably have been intended to result in such abuses as witnessed in the recent photos and videos.”
Hersh is saying that officials [“responsible” is certainly an ambiguous modifier here] approved programs and a reckless lack of oversight over those programs in a way that could certainly be expected to result in abuses such as the ones at Abu Ghirab.
The phrasing “could conceivably have been intended to result in such abuses” is of the same species of legalese that convinces Rumsfeld that there’s got to be a torture loophole somewhere.)
The Washington Post backs up Seymour Hersh’s scoop, and adds some more details about the abuses at Abu Ghraib, including “a guard [who] attacked, beat and hung a handcuffed Iraqi by his wrists — dislocating his shoulders” — just like they used to do in Rush Limbaugh’s fraternity initiations.
Another good review of what has been discovered about officially sanctioned torture of American-held war prisoners (in Iraq and Gitmo, primarily) is found in this New York Review of Books story.
Meanwhile, “[a]n Afghan captive froze to death in a CIA-run lockup in Kabul in after he was doused with water and shackled overnight to a wall,” begins a Los Angeles Times article on the death of captives in U.S. custody.
On the one hand, it would be a mistake to go along with the “half a dozen bad apples” theory of what happened in Abu Ghraib (er, I mean Camp Redemption).
Clearly the problem was not just caused by a small handful of people going savage, and the solution to the problem won’t be simply to isolate and denounce those people.
On the other hand, if we pursue this line of thought too recklessly, we can find ourselves propping up the “I was only following orders” excuse.
A military intelligence analyst who recently completed duty at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq said that the 16-year-old son of a detainee there was abused by U.S. soldiers to break his father’s resistance to interrogators.
The analyst said the teenager was stripped naked, thrown in the back of an open truck, driven around in the cold night air, splattered with mud and then presented to his father at Abu Ghraib, the prison at the center of the scandal over abuse of Iraqi detainees.
Upon seeing his frail and frightened son, the prisoner broke down and cried and told interrogators he would tell them whatever they wanted, the analyst said.
No one in his right mind would prefer living in Pol Pot’s Cambodia to George W. Bush’s America, unless he was a moral monster who anticipated that Pol Pot’s Cambodia would allow him greater latitude for committing evil.
But such a distinction is not very different from the fact that some slave-owners were far more decent to their slaves than others.
Similarly, if you knew that your neighborhood was bound to be taken over by one of a pair of mobsters, no doubt you would rather Sammy “The Prudent” Giamboni won his gang war against Jimmy “Mad Dog” O’Sullivan.
But the fact that the behavior of some slave owners or mob bosses is less onerous than that of others does not obviate the immoral nature of slavery and protection rackets.
Nor can any state justify its existence or its actions by noting that the some other state is even more despicable than it is.
The fact that the soldiers involved were operating with the authority of a state behind them ought to figure prominently in any analysis of what occurred at that prison.
They had been taught, most likely from childhood and certainly since joining the military, that loyalty to the state ruling over them is a sacred obligation.
They were told, again and again, that the vital interests of the State can negate any limits that traditional moral strictures might place on their behavior.
The individuals at Abu Ghraib who were the immediate source of the abuse suffered by the prisoners certainly should have known that their actions were immoral.
The nature of the institutional setting in which they found themselves does not relieve them of responsibility for the crimes they committed.
Nevertheless, that setting helps make their evil deeds more comprehensible.
The best thing I’ve seen written lately about Abu Ghraib is The Logic of Torture by Mark Danner in The New York Review of Books.
Danner does a good job of summarizing what we know about the treatment of prisoners in Iraq, Afghanistan, Gitmo, etc. and how this relates both to changing government policy and to the science of coercive interrogation and torture as it was developed by the CIA in .
The current U.S. government, Danner says, “made a series of decisions about methods of warfare and interrogation… [that] transform[ed] the United States from a nation that did not torture to one that did.
And the decisions were not, at least in their broad outlines, kept secret.
They were known to officials of the other branches of the government, and to the public.”
Anyone remember Abu Ghraib?
Seems like only .
Did you read about the recently-released Army investigation into the abuses there and elsewhere?
No?
It’s getting great reviews:
“effectively communicates the strategy of the military brass on the detainee affair, which is to focus blame on a few low-ranking personnel, shield all senior commanders from accountability, and deny or bury any facts that interfere with these aims… implausible and unacceptable.” ―Washington Post
“this 300-page whitewash… found no ‘systemic’ problem… The inspector general’s staff did not dig into the abuse cases, but merely listed them.” ―New York Times
The Democrats sure have been making a lot of noise lately.
Maybe they’ll show some remorse for giving Dubya a blank check to invade Iraq, for signing off on the “Patriot Act” with a salute, and for the rest of their cowardly cave-ins by showing some purposeful outrage now.
This shall not stand!
The United States will not wink at torture or enshrine it as a policy and our Democratic Party will not allow this to happen!
Cue Democrats.
I’m happy to say that I watched none of the convention, and I look forward to to devoting just as little attention to that of the Republicans.
But Zeynep Toufe of Under the Same Sun took a gander and failed “to hear the words ‘torture,’ ‘abuse,’ or ‘Abu Ghraib’ mentioned anywhere in the Democratic National Convention.”
Just to make sure it wasn’t just a bad sample, Zeynep searched through the transcripts of the speeches as they were posted to the Democrats’ website.
None of the transcripts mentioned those words, including the speeches by:
Roberta Achtenberg
David Alston
Rep. Tammy Baldwin
Marcia Bristo
President Jimmy Carter
President Bill Clinton
Senator Hillary Clinton
Howard Dean
Rep. Rosa DeLauro
Rep. John Dingell
Shirley Franklin
Rep. Richard Gephardt
Vice-President Al Gore
Teresa Heinz Kerry
Barack Obama
She checked the transcripts again the following day, when ’s prime-time speakers were up — including the darling of the left Dennis Kucinich.
Still no mention, so Zeynep kept adding to her list:
Senator Bob Graham
Governor Jennifer Granholm
Hon. Cheryl Jacques
Rep. Dennis Kucinich
Governor Bill Richardson
Al Sharpton
Did Kerry say anything about it in his acceptance speech?
I’m not even going to look, so if you think I’m being cynical about the Democrats’ great hope, go check it out for yourself and you can triumphantly send me the transcript if my cynicism is unwarranted.
Make note also of the amount of time the Democrats are crowing about how bravely John Kerry fought in the Vietnam War and how little time they’re talking about how bravely John Kerry fought against the Vietnam War.
Kerry’s decided to surrender in this battle to keep history from being rewritten by the Rambo Brigade — like he surrendered to Dubya and voted to give him the blank check — like he surrendered to Ashcroft and gave him the “Patriot Act” — and like he’s surrendering now when he could stand up and fight for something worth winning, rather than just a tarnished trophy like the presidency.
It seems that his days of bravery are behind him.
“But,” says the donkey on my shoulder, “would you expect Bush to make any brave or good decisions in a second term?
At least in Kerry you have someone who can point to an episode or two of genuinely honorable behavior in his life.”
Bush went from drunken ne’er-d’ye-well to much-less-of-a-fuck-up (though on a grander scale).
Not anything to expect an award for, but at least a move in the right direction.
Kerry on the other hand has effectively disowned his most honorable moment, glamorized the war that he should know as much as anyone was shameful to have fought, and has spent the last several years being a cowardly politician.
He may be easily no worse than Bush now, but I don’t like his momentum.
I imagine a President Kerry willing to do anything to keep Joe Lieberman or Fox News from questioning his commitment to the stupid hawkish patriotic bullshit he’s “proud” to support.
Rusting museum of our attempted suicide survives in the desert — Jon Else revisits the nuclear weapons test site at Frenchman Flat:
“An enormous Mosler bank vault sits abandoned and forgotten on the dry lake bed of Frenchman Flat, Nev.
It is ugly and rusting, a big cookie jar from hell — yet it now exists as one of America’s greatest monuments to clear thinking.
¶
That giant safe is a relic of an Atomic Energy Commission experiment in (“Response of Protective Vaults to Blast Loading”).
Filled with stocks and bonds, cash and insurance policies, it confirmed that our official valuables, contracts and financial instruments could survive nuclear war.…
¶
Today, as we sweat over whether North Korea has four bombs or six, or whether Iran has any at all, remember that in , only 12 years after the Trinity test — the first nuclear explosion in history took place at Alamogordo, N.M., on — the United States was manufacturing 10 nuclear bombs per day, 3,000 fission and fusion bombs every year.
The largest deployable weapon in our arsenal was the 5-megaton Mark 21, powerful enough to flatten 400 Hiroshimas (or Fallujahs or Oaklands) at a pop.
¶
Filling that Mosler vault with stocks and bonds in now seems a surreal gesture of hope.
Imagine the bomb’s survivors — a hairless, sterilized post-nuclear Adam and Eve, dry heaving (like the radioactive feral dogs that roamed the deserted streets of Chernobyl) — crawling toward the bank vault in their bloody rags, trying to remember the combination, praying for their Chrysler stock, or Grandpa’s gold watch, or their Prudential personal liability policies.”
Perhaps you’ve heard that some libertarian-minded sorts are hoping to gather the faithful and make their Gulch in New Hampshire.
They may be joined by the town of Killington, which wants to secede from their current state and become a little island of New Hampshire deep inside Vermont.
What’s triggering the revolt? Taxes, of course.
If you can stand to read any more, investigators into the abuses at Abu Ghraib have released their reports.
One detainee “was made to bark like a dog and crawl on his stomach while U.S. soldiers spat and urinated on him.
He also was beaten into unconsciousness.
On another occasion, he was forced to lie on the ground while MPs jumped on his back and legs.
He also was sodomized with a police stick, the report said.”
And they went after the juvenile detainees with police dogs to try to get them to piss and shit themselves.
You can find the unclassified portions of the Fay Report (PDF) on-line.
Read it before Donald Rumsfeld does.
Just for fun… try to find the name “Abu Ghraib” or the word “torture” in the transcript of the first Bush-Kerry debate.
You might get a hit on “leash” but it’s either a false-positive or a Freudian slip.
The devastating scandal of Abu Ghraib wasn’t a failure of implementation, as [National Security Adviser Condoleezza] Rice and other administration defenders have admitted.
It was a direct — and predictable — consequence of a policy, hatched at the highest levels of the administration, by senior White House officials and lawyers, in the weeks and months after .
Yet the administration has largely managed to escape responsibility for those decisions; a month from election day, almost no one in the press or the political class is talking about what is, without question, the worst scandal to emerge from President Bush’s in office.
Defenders of the administration have argued, of course, that there is no “smoking gun” — no chain of orders leading directly from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to Pfc. Lynndie England and her co-conspirators.
But that reasoning — now largely accepted within the Beltway — betrays a deliberate indifference to how large organizations such as the military actually work.
In any war, civilian leaders set strategic aims, and it falls to commanders and planners at successively lower levels of command to refine that guidance into executable orders which can be handed down to subordinates.
That process works whether the policy in question is a good one or a bad one.
President Bush didn’t order the “thunder run” into Baghdad; he ordered Tommy Franks to win the war and the Third Infantry Division’s leaders figured out how to make it happen.
Likewise, no order was given to shove light sticks into the rectums of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib.
Nevertheless, the road to the abuses began with flawed administration policies that exalted expediency and necessity over the rule of law, eviscerated the military’s institutional constraints on the treatment of prisoners, commenced combat with insufficient planning, preparation and troop strength, and thereby set the conditions for the abuses that would later take place.
Remember the dead guy on ice in those Abu Ghraib photos?
The one that Charles Graner and Lynndie England posed with in their beaming smiles and their green surgical-gloved hands in thumbs-up poses?
Today the Associated Press told us the story of how he died.
Al-Jamadi was one of the CIA’s “ghost” detainees at Abu Ghraib — prisoners being held secretly by the agency.…
Al-Jamadi died in a prison shower room during about a half-hour of questioning, before interrogators could extract any information, according to the documents, which consist of statements from Army prison guards to investigators with the military and the CIA’s Inspector General’s office.
One Army guard, Sgt. Jeffery Frost, said the prisoner’s arms were stretched behind him in a way he had never before seen.
Frost told investigators he was surprised al-Jamadi’s arms “didn’t pop out of their sockets,” according to a summary of his interview.
Frost and other guards had been summoned to reposition al-Jamadi, who an interrogator said was not cooperating.
As the guards released the shackles and lowered al-Jamadi, blood gushed from his mouth “as if a faucet had been turned on,” according to the interview summary.
The military pathologist who ruled the case a homicide found several broken ribs and concluded al-Jamadi died from pressure to the chest and difficulty breathing.
Andrew Sullivan, one of the few conservatives who seem to be in the least bit troubled by this, notes:
Why is that detail so important (that it was a CIA interrogator who ordered the abuse)?
Because the Dubya Squad have been trying hard to distinguish the ostensibly unauthorized torture that we have photographic evidence of — the shenanigans at Abu Ghraib — from the “our lawyers tell us it’s not torture” that they’ve authorized the CIA to conduct or oversee.
If the CIA was running interrogations at Abu Ghraib itself using techniques that have already been ruled torture by international courts (Turkey got caught using the “Palestinian hanging” technique) — there goes that attempt at an excuse.
But the Dubya Squad’s main strategy in all of this has been neither obfuscation nor secrecy — the size of the tip of the iceberg that’s already leaked out amazes me.
Nope: their strategy is to assume that even if the truth comes out, the American people and the other branches of government probably won’t make a big deal about it.
So far, it’s working.
You gotta look hard to find the silver lining to the cloud over Abu Ghraib, but the Christian Science Monitor
comes up with a good nominee:
If any lesson can be drawn from the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse legal fallout so far, it may be this:
The lowest-level soldier has the highest level of responsibility.
The rank and file must clearly know right from wrong — both in terms of their own actions and orders from superiors.
“What the average soldier is going to take away from Abu Ghraib is a reinforcement of what he learned at boot camp — that he’s responsible for his actions,” says Mary Hall, a former military judge now in private practice.
“These Abu Ghraib courts-martial are a blunt reminder to even the newest private that they have a duty to just say ‘no.’ ”
Raise your hand if you went to boot camp and came away from it with the understanding that when given an order, you have the duty to carefully evaluate its morality and legality and then just say “no” if the order does not meet your standards.
Still, it’s nice to imagine what might happen if an epidemic of questioning authority suddenly broke out in the military.
Groups like Courage To Resist are trying to bring that about:
Objection and resistance by military servicepersons is a healthy and important assertion of Democracy in a country where the decisions to invade Iraq, to maintain an occupation, and engage in widespread human right violations and torture were made undemocratically in violation of international law and based on continuing lies and disinformation.
This is one part of a three-part strategy aimed at shortening the war and preventing future wars by exacerbating staffing problems in the military: encourage deserters and conscientious objectors, interfere with recruitment, and prepare to frustrate the draft if it should come back (the fourth part, removing U.S. soldiers from the field of battle by force, has been outsourced).
I am of the opinion that in a modern war like the one in Iraq, where the ratio of American dollars spent to American soldiers buried is in the million-to-one range, that another way we can strike at the war effort is to try to defund it.
Certainly the military does a fine job of losing money on its own, but I still think they need our help.
A shout-out to my buddy “Mayhem,” whose whimsical yet pointed art project at the Burning Man festival this year noted the connection between tax dollars and torture.
(Photos by “Mayhem”)
The festival’s theme this year was “the American dream” and this naturally invited some political commentary at a festival where “message” art is typically rare.
In “Mayhem”’s installation, passers-by could give electric shocks to a mannequin representing the iconic Abu Ghraib prisoner by pedaling a stationary bike nearby.
It’s participatory!
And just as participatory (a placard explained) is the real-life torture policy, thanks to the tax dollars that support it.
But we are revolting!
Oh.
Also this week I watched two documentaries about U.S. soldiers — both very good ones.
Sir!
No Sir! is about GI resistance during the Vietnam War.
It’s a real eye-opener, and does a good job of shining some light on the roaches whose revisionist dolchstoßlegende history of the Vietnam War has been plaguing the United States for the past twenty-five years or so.
Standard Operating Procedure is master-documentarian Errol Morris’s take on the Abu Ghraib photos scandal.
It’s a very good documentary, and includes interviews with many of the Americans most intimately involved with the photographed incidents.
However, the story it tells concentrates on a couple of idiosyncratic viewpoints that tend to warp it and limit its scope: 1) that the soldiers in the photos were railroaded in an attempt to shield higher-ups from responsibility (and the film makes this case persuasively), and 2) that the nature of photography and of our relationship to photographic evidence can be one that distorts the truth and leads people to adhere quickly and strongly to mistaken impressions.
(You can see more of this persepctive in the New Yorker article from Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris on the subject from earlier this year.)
This all has the result of pushing the victimized prisoners into the background of the story (none of them or their families are interviewed in the film) and making them props in a drama about America and Americans and what this all meant to us.
And while it’s easy to come to sympathize somewhat with these soldiers over the course of the film — they certainly come off more sympathetically than they do in the grinning, thumbs-up abuse shots we’re all familiar with, and there’s certainly no justice in laying what happened at Abu Ghraib entirely at their feet — it’s still remarkable how much, to them, what happened is all about them and what they suffered, and how little they refer to their victims and who they were and what their stories were and what ever happened to them.
