Prisoners of their own delusions

Even as the sociopaths in the White House try to clamp a lid on the fallout from the revelations of US abuse and torture of Iraqi captives, the issue continues to widen. Amnesty International, for example, charges that what's been seen is "the tip of the iceberg and that it has uncovered widespread torture," reported CNN on Sunday.

Nicole Choueiry, Amnesty's Middle East spokeswoman, said the group had detailed "scores" of reports of ill-treatment over the past year but the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq had ignored them.

"We have said there are patterns of torture by coalition forces," Choueiry told CNN on Sunday.

"The only good thing to come out of this would be if the pictures forced the coalition to launch an independent investigation and for its findings to be published in full."

(Amnesty's press release can be found here; a March 18 report on the state of human rights in Iraq is here.)

And Reed Brody, special counsel with Human Rights Watch, writing in the International Herald Tribune for May 3, reminds us that Iraq is not the only case.

Across the world, the United States is holding detainees in offshore and foreign prisons where allegations of mistreatment cannot be monitored. It has also been accused of sending terror suspects to countries where information has been beaten out of them. ...

The classic case, of course, has been Guantanamo, Cuba, which the Bush administration deliberately chose as a detention facility for more than 700 detainees from 44 countries in an attempt to put them beyond the reach of the U.S. courts - and of any courts, for that matter. The U.S. government has argued that U.S. courts would not have jurisdiction over these detainees even if it they were being tortured or summarily executed.

But Guantanamo may not be the worst problem; indeed, it may even be a diversion from more extreme situations. ...

This is all the more disturbing because the United States has failed to provide clear information on its treatment of 10,000 civilians held in Iraq - and has provided no information at all for at least 200 so-called "high security detainees."

In Afghanistan, the United States is also holding civilians in a legal black hole at a number of off-limits detention facilities - with no tribunals, no legal counsel and no family visits.

Human Rights Watch has presented compelling evidence that there, too, U.S. personnel have committed inhumane and degrading acts against detainees. ... Three people have died in U.S. custody there, and two of the deaths were ruled homicides by U.S. military doctors who performed autopsies. ...

The Bush administration has still not answered charges leveled in The Washington Post which, citing numerous unnamed U.S. officials, described the rendition of captured Al Qaeda suspects from U.S. custody to other countries, such as Uzbekistan, Pakistan, Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Morocco, where they were tortured or mistreated. These countries, like Syria, are ones where the United States itself has criticized the practice of torture.

In the case of the murders in Afghanistan, Reuters tells us on May 4 that

a soldier was convicted in the U.S. military justice system of killing a prisoner by hitting him with a rock, and was reduced in rank to private and thrown out of the service but did not serve any jail time.

Somehow, "you're fired" doesn't seem to do justice to the accusation.

In the meantime, this has of course spurred rage across the Muslim world and has provoked fundamentalist Islamic parties to accuse the US and the UK of having demonstrated "the hatred of their countries toward Islamic people" in the words of Nasharuddin Isa, secretary general of the fundamentalist Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party, the country's largest opposition group.

I don't believe that the US has a hatred of Islamic people - obviously there is among some, too many, hatred of and among many more paranoia about Muslims in general and Arab Muslims in particular (part of the problem being that so many of us don't know the difference) , but no, I don't believe it can be said that "the US hates Muslims." However, what I believe can be said is what I've already said before: The brutalization of war can turn ordinary people into callous beasts, especially ordinary people from an insular society largely ignorant of other cultures who are trained to think of their "enemies" as "ragheads" and "towelheads." (I still recall the quote from the first Gulf War where some fighter pilot expressed his confidence about the upcoming battle because "I can't believe that some camel jockey with a towel on his head can be as smart as I am.")

I recall reading some time ago a quote by General S. L. A. Marshall:

A revealing light is thrown on this subject through the studies by Medical Corps psychiatrists of the combat fatigue cases in the European Theater. They found that fear of killing, rather than fear of being killed, was the most common cause of battle fatigue in the individual, and that fear of failure ran a strong second.

It is therefore reasonable to believe that the average and normally healthy individual - the man who can endure the mental and physical stresses of combat - still has such an inner and usually unrealized resistance toward killing a fellow man that he will not of his own volition take life if it is possible to turn away from that responsibility.

(From Men Against Fire, 1947.)

Marshall saw that as a problem "which needs to be analyzed and understood if we are to prevail against it in the interest of battle efficiency." That is exactly what Basic Training is designed to do: to prevail against the disinclination of normal human beings to kill others. I have long argued that the prerequisite for turning someone into an effective combat soldier is convincing them to think of their enemy as somehow not quite human. As I used to put it, the US didn't fight Germans and Japanese in World War II, it fought Krauts and Nips. In Korea and Vietnam, it was gooks. Now, it's ragheads.

While I say again that I refuse to exonerate the soldiers who gleefully abused, humiliated, and beat prisoners while turning their suffering into souveniers, I say also that the source of their sickness was not some perversion of their own, not some failure of command, but rather the success of command in getting them to think of a prisoner as, as appears in a number of descriptions, "it." (One such example is found in Monday's New York Times; check the last paragraph of this story. Note that the speaker was not even one of the abusers.) That's why this is not an isolated incident and why it will get worse before it gets better.

But of course, we already know it's not isolated. We already know about the report given more than two months ago, March 3 to be exact, by Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba, who said that

[b]etween October and December 2003, at the Abu Ghraib Confinement Facility (BCCF), numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses were inflicted on several detainees.

This systemic and illegal abuse of detainees was intentionally perpetrated by several members of the military police guard force (372nd Military Police Company, 320th Military Police Battalion, 800th MP Brigade), in Tier (section) 1-A of the Abu Ghraib Prison (BCCF).

Despite that, the administration is still sticking to the "isolated incident" defense. Colin Powell referred to the "small number" of American troops involved while Condoleezza Rice talked about the "specific cases of those particular photographs." But as the matter continues to spin beyond their control, look for the shift to the "terrible things sometimes happen in war" defense. That will be the sign that they know they're in real trouble.