Have things really gotten that bad? → U.S. government is cruel, despotic, a threat to people → U.S. torture policy → cover-ups, wrist-slapping of abusers

And now for some more stories…

“There is no peace candidate in this race,” said Ashton Carter, a Defense Department official in the Clinton administration and now a senior Kerry adviser on military matters who helped craft the June policy speech. “No candidate who is a peace candidate ought to win.”
What if you’re an American soldier who is caught red-handed abusing or even killing prisoners of war? Quake in fear, soldier — for you might be subjected to “reprimands, fines, rank reductions, bars on Internet use and ‘Chapter 10’ agreements, which allow some soldiers who admit guilt to leave the military under less-than-honorable conditions but without being prosecuted.”
What’s happening with all of those billions of dollars being spent by the Iraqi occupation forces? The clearest overview I’ve seen yet is in Pratap Chatterjee’s The Thief of Baghdad.
There’s a second superpower challenging the might of the United States’ empire, says James F. Moore of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society. This superpower is found on-line, and “demonstrates a new form of ‘emergent democracy’… How does the second superpower take action? Not from the top, but from the bottom. That is, it is the strength of the US government that it can centrally collect taxes, and then spend, for example, $1.2 billion on 1,200 cruise missiles in the first day of the war against Iraq. By contrast, it is the strength of the second superpower that it could mobilize hundreds of small groups of activists to shut down city centers across the United States on that same first day of the war. And that millions of citizens worldwide would take to their streets to rally.” Well, it’s a thought.

Nagam Hatab was hooded and cuffed by U.S. troops who suspected that he had participated in an ambush that killed 11 other soldiers.

Within two days of Hatab’s arrest in June 2003, a guard found his lifeless, naked body covered in his own waste in a yard at Camp Whitehorse outside Nasiriyah.
According to a Lance Cpl. Roy, who has been granted immunity, [Sgt. Gary] Pittman, who in civilian life was a federal prison guard, karate-kicked the handcuffed, hooded Hatab in the chest so hard that he flew three feet before hitting the floor.
An autopsy concluded that Hatab had seven broken ribs and suffocated from a crushed windpipe. Defense lawyers say Hatab died of natural causes, perhaps from an asthma attack.

Pittman was court martialed and convicted, and today he was sentenced… “to 60 days of hard labor and demoted to the rank of private.”

“This was about as light a punishment as they could give,” said Pittman’s civilian defense attorney, John Tranberg. “This was a tremendous outcome.”

Remember a few days back when I mentioned that a U.S. soldier had been court martialed for beating a hooded, handcuffed Iraqi to death? The soldier was convicted and given a sixty day sentence and a demotion, which his lawyer, naturally, called “a tremendous outcome.”

Well… it turns out that part of the reason why they’re having a hard time enforcing any significant penalties against this sort of brutality is that much of the evidence has been “lost”:

The missing evidence includes bones taken from the throat and chest of Nagem Hatab, attorneys said Thursday at a hearing for Maj. Clarke Paulus.… ¶ The missing bones are just one of several errors in the investigation that came to light at Thursday’s hearing.
Hatab’s organs, which were removed during autopsy, were subsequently destroyed when they were left for hours in the blazing heat on an Iraqi airstrip. A summary of an interrogation the Marines conducted with Hatab shortly before his death at the camp also is missing, as is a photo of Hatab that was taken during questioning.

Oh well, you win some (when) you lose some.

One of the more than 5,000 U.S. military deserters, Jeremy Hinzman, had an Immigration and Refugee Board hearing in Canada at which another ex-soldier, Jimmy Massey testified that U.S. military atrocities were commonplace in Iraq.

His story is one of an increasing number that tell of the savagery of the occupation troops. This despite strong measures to try to keep this brutality from being brought to light:

On June 15, 2003, Sgt. Frank “Greg” Ford, a counterintelligence agent in the California National Guard’s 223^rd Military Intelligence (M.I.) Battalion stationed in Samarra, Iraq, told his commanding officer, Capt. Victor Artiga, that he had witnessed five incidents of torture and abuse of Iraqi detainees at his base, and requested a formal investigation. Thirty-six hours later, Ford, a 49-year-old with over 30 years of military service in the Coast Guard, Army and Navy, was ordered by U.S. Army medical personnel to lie down on a gurney, was then strapped down, loaded onto a military plane and medevac’d to a military medical center outside the country.
Although no “medevac” order appears to have been written, in violation of Army policy, Ford was clearly shipped out because of a diagnosis that he was suffering from combat stress. After Ford raised the torture allegations, Artiga immediately said Ford was “delusional” and ordered a psychiatric examination, according to Ford. But that examination, carried out by an Army psychiatrist, diagnosed him as “completely normal.”
A witness, Sgt. 1^st Class Michael Marciello, claims that Artiga became enraged when he read the initial medical report finding nothing wrong with Ford and intimidated the psychiatrist into changing it. According to Marciello, Artiga angrily told the psychiatrist that it was a “C.I. [counterintelligence] or M.I. matter” and insisted that she had to change her report and get Ford out of Iraq.
Documents show that all subsequent examinations of Ford by Army mental-health professionals, over many months, confirmed his initial diagnosis as normal.

That’s from today’s Salon magazine. An ACLU press release yesterday tells of another cover-up:

A June 25, 2004 memo from Vice Admiral Lowell E. Jacoby, Defense Intelligence Agency chief, entitled “alleged detainee abuse by TF 62-6,” describing how DIA personnel who complained about abuses were threatened, had their car keys confiscated and e-mails monitored, and were ordered “not to talk to anyone in the U.S.” or leave the base “even to get a haircut.”
The June 25 memo also describes how the task force’s officers punched a prisoner in the face “to the point he needed medical attention,” failed to record the medical treatment, and confiscated DIA photos of the injuries. The date of the incident is unclear.

Combine what we know of the abuses that have come to light with this new evidence of the vigor of cover-up attempts, then add in the Dubya Squad’s penchant for secrecy and foot-dragging about FOIA disclosures, and then estimate the size of the iceberg we’re seeing the tip of.

Update: a St. Louis Post-Dispatch report published on 5 November 2005 cast doubt on the atrocity stories told by Jimmy Massey. However, that report has itself been called into doubt. See also: this Democracy Now debate, and Paul Rockwell’s defense of Massey.

I said I had given up reporting about the U.S. torture policy here at The Picket Line, so instead here’s a story about a man who said he didn’t feel well and subsequently lost consciousness [then] died of natural causes.

Some bits and pieces:

Colin Beavan, the No Impact Man, writes about his interesting project, and about the possibilities of ostentatious individual action as a form of activism.
Metafilter shares some resources about the early-1970s rent strikes by residents of government-run council housing in England.
Nine years ago, an Oakland police officer beat a suspect, breaking his ribs and puncturing his lungs. The man later died of his injuries, and the officer ordered his subordinates to lie about the beating. The officer was caught during an Internal Affairs investigation of the case. What was the result? The officer was suspended for two weeks and then promoted to be the head of the Internal Affairs division.