Abu Ghraib

[winterbadger]

I was thinking about the apparent fall-out from the discovery of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib: at least from the news stories I've read lately, the enlisted personnel seem to be getting all the heat. General Taguba's report (which can be read here or here) clearly lays out the failures on the part of leadership, from the commanders of the MI and MP brigades on down through the battalion commanders, company commanders, and senior NCOs to take effective action to redress abuse or misbehavior on the part of the guards or to make sure, for heavens' sake, that the units detailed to run prison facilities had any training in how to do that task. They very definitely had not had any such training, and while their commanders explicitly recognized that fact, those officers failed to correct that essential problem.

General Taguba recommended that a number officers be given general reprimands and relieved of duty. I'm still looking, but so far only one of those officers, General Karpinksi, seems to have been so treated. Meanwhile we have seven SPCs, a PFC, and two sergeants who are taking all the heat for what went on. The Army is trying to rubbish the allegations that MI instructed the soldiers to "soften up" the prisoners for interrogation, despite the testimony of various soldiers that that was the specific intent of the mistreatment and the evidence from prisoners' accounts (available online here) that in several cases confessions were sought and were forthcoming after the mistreatment (not very surprising; hurt someone and they're quite liable to tell you whatever they think you want to hear in order to stop the pain.)

So the small fry are getting punishment (which it sounds like they certainly deserve), but their superiors, who were responsible for making sure this sort of thing didn't happen and failed, are suffering few or no consequences. This just seems wrong.

Let me just add, on that point, that I have nothing but contempt for the way the SecDef and the CJCoS have handled this. Rumsfeld has claimed he is accepting complete responsibility, but he seems to think that by saying that, he's dealt with the situation. If he's responsible for the situation (which I don't think he is, unless he authorized the use of torture), then he should resign. If you're responsible for gross abuse and torture of prisoners, you have no place in the US military or the US government; I can't see how there's any question there. If it happened on your watch and you should have been more vigilant, that's a whole different issue; you should apologize, make restitution, and fix the system (Rumsfeld has done the first two but not the third).

As for General Myers, he said, when addressing the troops at Abu Ghraib back in may:

I am very confident in your chain of command. Let me talk about it, going down. You couldn’t have finer leadership than General John Abizaid, General Rick Sanchez, on down to the folks that run this facility. I have great confidence that, hopefully, you haven’t been tortured by any of the testimony we’ve been involved in the last several days. But if you had – and you’ve heard me say -- that as a witness in front of several committees, that our chain of command is what it’s all about and I’ve got great confidence in them.

He has confidence in the chain of command? After General Taguba's report? The only thing that, to me, is worse than his saying "oh, the chain is fine; nothing needs to be done there; no one needs to be held accountable" is his using the word "torture" in reference to how the soldiers a AGP might feel about testimony concerning the prisoner abuse. That is callous and insensitive and should have earned him an immediate admonition and resulted in an apology from him to the abused prisoners and their families. He's mocking them by using that word, and that's simply unacceptable.

The other half of this particular rant deals with my feelings about the use of the word "torture" in general and the public's perception of what went on at AGP. Reading the transcripts of the prisoners' statements (again, these can be found here), I was truly appalled in a way that all the photographs had not produced. Making people get naked, making them get in a pile, even leading someone around on a leash: these are abusive and humiliating, but to me they don't rate as torture. But the constant and continual beatings, punchings, the sodomization with sticks and pieces of wire, dousing prisoners in cold water in the wintertime, tying or chaining prisoners to cell bars or beds for prolonged periods of time--this sounds like something from a Nazi concentration camp. It sounds, in fact, just like what Iraqi soldiers did to US and UK soldiers captured during the First Gulf War. To me that's much more severe and unacceptable than breaking someone's cultural taboos (as bad as the latter is), but it seems to get very little play in the press because there are no photographs of it. The photographs that are supposed to be so terribly, terribly horrifying seem mostly to be thought so because they show prisoners with no clothes on or being otherwise humiliated. That these acts are seen as the really, really bad things that were done, because that's what we have photos of, disturbs me. It's as if it isn't real if we don't have pictures, as if the pictures we do have force the worse actions into the background. Maybe it's only my own reactions that I'm seeing.

In any event, read the Taguba report; it seems pretty clear from that that some MP units had no idea what they were doing and ran prison camps very badly, which resulted in numerous escapes and the death and injury of a good many detainees (in one instance, a protest of poor living conditions in a camp turned into a riot that left 3 detainees dead, 9 wounded, and 9 US soldiers wounded, all because the MPs didn't know how to handle the situation.) Other camps were very well run; but no attempt was made, apparently to fix the poorly operating ones, to figure out what was going wrong, or to learn from the problems.

Instead of just court-martialling half a dozen other ranks, the Army needs to get this problem sorted and fix the command level problems. But it would appear no one is pushing them to do that.

Comments

[winterbadger]

Good lord! Your English is tremendously good for a nonnative speaker. There are actually plenty of native speakers I can think of who don't speak it as well as you do. :-)

Funny, when I was searching my mind for countries who I was fairly sure contribute to peacekeeping operations pretty regularly who I would rate as more professional than most, Finland sprang to mind right away. :-) Though I imagine some things happened during the jatkosota (on both sides) that night not have been entirely Geneva-approved... The sad thing is that when people feel they're fighting for survival, they'll do anything (not surprisingly), and whoever they're fighting tends to react in kind.

[cutedeadgirl.livejournal.com]

Yes the The Winter War and The Continuation War, and also The Civil War where reds and whites killed eachother were quite... interesting and not so civil at all times. For a small country our history is extremely interesting.

And sorry if that's too many links, I'm just full of links for almost anything possible. *lol*

[winterbadger]

Nothing wrong with links! :-) Share the love knowledge!