News fit to print

It's been all over the left blogworld today, so I'm sure you've come across it already if you didn't see it in the actual newspaper. But I had to mention it anyway to make sure you hear about it and read it. Not just the blog coverage, the article itself. Because it's all the more damning for it's detached, reportorial tone. Facts, descriptions, "this happened, then this happened."

Even as the young Afghan man was dying before them, his American jailers continued to torment him.

The prisoner, a slight, 22-year-old taxi driver known only as Dilawar, was hauled from his cell at the detention center in Bagram, Afghanistan, at around 2 a.m. to answer questions about a rocket attack on an American base. When he arrived in the interrogation room, an interpreter who was present said, his legs were bouncing uncontrollably in the plastic chair and his hands were numb. He had been chained by the wrists to the top of his cell for much of the previous four days.

The New York Times' major May 20 story on the Army's criminal investigation into deaths and brutality visited on detainees at the now-infamous Bagram Collection Point in Afghanistan is painful but necessary reading - and an indication of what a leading newspaper can do when it chooses to.

Like a narrative counterpart to the digital images from Abu Ghraib, the Bagram file depicts young, poorly trained soldiers in repeated incidents of abuse. ...

In some instances, testimony shows, it was directed or carried out by interrogators to extract information. In others, it was punishment meted out by military police guards. Sometimes, the torment seems to have been driven by little more than boredom or cruelty, or both.

But it was much more than that, went well beyond the now-standard line of "young, poorly trained soldiers" who were unfortunately not given enough oversight. They unquestionably were abetted by higher-ups:

Military spokesmen maintained that both men had died of natural causes, even after military coroners had ruled the deaths homicides. Two months after those autopsies, the American commander in Afghanistan, then-Lt. Gen. Daniel K. McNeill, said he had no indication that abuse by soldiers had contributed to the two deaths. The methods used at Bagram, he said, were "in accordance with what is generally accepted as interrogation techniques."

And, in fact, they still are:

Last October, the Army's Criminal Investigation Command concluded that there was probable cause to charge 27 officers and enlisted personnel with criminal offenses in the Dilawar case ranging from dereliction of duty to maiming and involuntary manslaughter.

What's more, fifteen of those same soldiers were cited for probable criminal responsibility in another inmate's death, which occurred just days before Dilawar arrived at Bagram.

Even so, to date only seven soldiers - and no officers - have been charged in connection with these crimes and no one has been convicted. Reprimands for two interrogators have been the only punishments.

Now, you could call that a whitewash, you could call it CYA. I call it a criminal conspiracy to obstruct justice by means of a coverup.

But there is something else I want to say here, something in which I dissent at least somewhat from some of my fellow bloggers. There is a good deal of sentiment expressed in these cases along the lines of "where are the officers? Why aren't they in the dock?" With that, I agree wholeheartedly. Where I differ with some - and no, I will not name anyone in particular because pointing fingers at individuals is not my desire in this - is when they take that to the point of lessening the guilt of the soldiers, even to the point of exonerating them because officers are not being marched to the professional gallows alongside them. That, I do not and will not accept. If two wrongs don't make a right, even less does ignoring of one wrong justify ignoring of another.

Inadequate training? Just how much training does it take to realize that beating people, slamming them into walls, keeping them chained to a ceiling for hours on end, denying them sleep, is inhumane?

Young? How mature does one have to be to get past beating someone just because you're bored or just because you thought the way they screamed was "funny?"

I don't buy it, no I don't. Say the guilt runs up the line, say the commanders are guilty as well (and as hell), say George Bush is the guiltiest of all. I'll agree with you. But as I've said before, just as we would not forgive someone who robbed a bank because someone else had robbed ten, so too does the greater guilt not expunge the lesser. The soldiers should not walk.

Now, there is a way to ease the soldiers' guilt, to lessen their individual responsibility. But it's one not often considered because of what it implies.

[T]he Bagram file includes ample testimony that harsh treatment by some interrogators was routine and that guards could strike shackled detainees with virtual impunity. Prisoners considered important or troublesome were also handcuffed and chained to the ceilings and doors of their cells, sometimes for long periods....

Routine. Impunity. "Troublesome." These are key words.

It's actually late and I'm overtired, so I'm going to cut this short; maybe I can expand on it later. But the bottom line is that you have a isolated world of groupthink with a built-in "other", an easily-definable "them," not even just "them" but enemy "them," a place where the ordinary rules don't apply, where violence is made routine and resistance something to be crushed. You have, that is, a situation where ordinary people become "ordinary torturers." Put another way, you have a military prison.

Put yet another way, you have militarism and the bigotry on which it thrives. So yes, you can look to exonerate the soldiers by pointing to the situation into which they were thrust. But that "situation" is not just the prison itself, it's the whole self-contained world of the military, the whole constructed worldview of militarism, that they carried with them into that prison. So yes again, you can look to exonerate the soldiers - but only by calling into question the entire set of structures, all the ways of acting, all the ways of thinking, that characterize what we persist in calling national "defense." Bagram, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, the others whose names are as yet unfamiliar, these are not aberrations of militarism, of a foreign policy (long-standing in its attitudes, varying only in its tactics) based on aggression and in pursuit of dominance, they are the natural outgrowths of them. And we can't hope to stop the symptoms without attacking the disease.

Footnote: As telling as the Times' story is, we should keep recalling that it is hardly the first.

CIA interrogators have been using "stress and duress" techniques on captured enemies in Afghanistan that blur the line between legal and inhumane, the Washington Post reported on Thursday.

That dispatch from Reuters, referring specifically to Bagram, was dated December 26, 2002: 17 months ago.