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

[peaceful-fox.livejournal.com]

You are correct in saying that the army should fix command level problems. People aren't taking any responsibility and are pointing fingers everywhere but where they should be pointed. This comes from the top down.

"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."

They aren't torture, but they still shouldn't have happened, plus we should know more about the prisoner abuses that weren't photographed. What bothers me the most is that Army Spec. Charles A. Graner Jr. had a past of prison abuse prior to his stint in the army. I mean, even if there is the suggestion of this type of thing, why did the army evey post him in a prison?

I agree with most of what you had to say. Good discussion!

[winterbadger]

but they still shouldn't have happened,

Agreed, hence my remark that they are abusive and humiliatiing :-)

plus we should know more about the prisoner abuses that weren't photographed.

Quite so, hence the second half of that paragraph.

What bothers me the most is that Army Spec. Charles A. Graner Jr. had a past of prison abuse prior to his stint in the army. I mean, even if there is the suggestion of this type of thing, why did the army evey post him in a prison?

This should have disqualified him from posting to a military police unit automatically. That it didn't bothers me a great deal too.

Good discussion!

Thank you! :-)

[cutedeadgirl.livejournal.com]

Thing is though - I've read from many sources, that to a muslim to do that is shameful and possibly worse than death. So in this case it does count as torture at least in my opinion.

The religion has so strict rules for nakedness and touching people and cleanness. For example I believe that Islam says they can not be nude in presence of others and they had to do not only that, but get in piles etc extremely humiliating things that all speak against the religion they are devoted to.

[cutedeadgirl.livejournal.com]

After a short search through my links I found this: http://www.shiamasjid.net/books/GreaterSins1/

It talks about sodomy, but it also counts even two men sleeping under same blanket with clothes on as big sin. It's interesting (even if a bit hard due to format) read if you haven't studied rules of Islam before.

[cutedeadgirl.livejournal.com]

Mhm... last link I promise Death before Dishonor, a story that american paper ran about the case.

[winterbadger]

If one were a strict fundamentalist Christian, many of the things that the prisoners were forced to do would be against one's religious beliefs too. I think there's a danger in assuming that everyone in a Muslim country is a strictly observant, fundamentalist Muslim. It's like assuming all Italians are fanatically devout Roman Catholics.

I'm very skeptical when anyone says that some sort of humiliation is "worse than death"; yes, people's cultural norms differ, and maybe it's just my own blinders, but I have trouble believing that, in the end, people forced into a humiliating situation would really rather be dead. If they were, they'd say, "No, kill me, but I will never do that."

During the early Nazi era, before the round-ups and the camps started, the SA would make old Jewish men get down on all fours and clean the street with their tongues or consume feces. Now, I'm sure that there must be some law in the Torah about not consuming feces (there're laws in the Torah about not doing almost everything...), but the poor old guys did it. Why? Because they would rather be alive, and humiliated, than dead.

Again, I agree that these were abusive acts. To me, they just don't rate as torture, though. It's just a personal perception.

I note that while the UN Convenant on Civil and Political Rights (http://www.hrweb.org/legal/cpr.html#Article%207) seems to agree with me (it separates torture and "cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment"), the Convention on Torture much more broadly refers to "severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental" (http://www.hrweb.org/legal/cat.html#Article%201.1).

[winterbadger]

Yes, it's not that I don't realize that these acts are considered sinful to Muslims; I just don't think that forcing someone to commit a sin is necessarily torture.

[cutedeadgirl.livejournal.com]

As these were just addition to my comment and not a response to what you just posted don't separate them from the first thing ;). Just examples for why I see it as I do. I see muslims as being quite a bit more fanatical about the religion and certain parts of it, like the nakedness, just as part of Jews are fanatical about how they eat. It's how they are raised within the religion. Christians rarely have such strict things, except in the smaller "sect" like things. My english is lacking again and stopping me from saying what exactly I mean, so please forgive me. *sigh*

[winterbadger]

Interesting, but again it deals at such a level of gross generalization that I have troulbe with it.

Yes, these were brutal and abusive guards who should be courtmartialled and put away for a long time, and their punishment should be made clear to all Iraqis, so they know that the difference between Americans and Saddam Hussein is that when our guards do this, they are severely punished. But by the same token, that needs to carry up the chain of command. Look at the Taguba report and you'll see there was an incident in which a soldier, through bad training and being sloppy, accidentally discharged his weapon when getting out of a vehicle. For that *accident*, the repecussions went up the chain of command four levels; the soldier's firs sergeant, his CSM, his company commander, and his battalion commanders *ALL* got General Orders of Reprimand for the soldier making that (incredibly dangerous and stupid) mistake. For the kind of abuse that went on in AGP, the consequences should go higher up the COC than a sergeant, and they shoud be more severe than a reprimand (even a GOMOR, which in most circumstances means your career is over).

[cutedeadgirl.livejournal.com]

Yes I do agree with that, I'm just still trying to understand how something like these things even were allowed to happen, and were more or less "ok" by the higher up officers. It certainly should go up as high as it can on the chain and none of them should be working in army ever again. I don't understand all the things you use here like "GOMOR" but I've noticed a lot of weird things happening in the US army anyway. I'm not sure if it's same all over the world, but I hope that is not the case. I'd like to have faith that if anything like that happened over here it would be delt with swiftly and hard.

[winterbadger]

GOMOR= general officer memorandum of reprimand

Where is "over here"?

I don't hold any brief for the US Army being better than other comparable armies in terms of its conduct, but it's certainly no worse than others. The British Army (which I think is one of the best trained and most disciplined and professional armies in the world) has been accused of similar misconduct in Iraq and in the Falklands, and it's documented to have shot civilians in Malaya and in Ireland and killed EPOWs in WWII on more than one occasion (usually in retaliation for similar conduct). The elite regiment of the Canadian Army, the Parachute Regiment, was disbanded after it was found its members had taken part in torture of enemy combatants.

Armies are composed of human beings, and some human beings are repellently violent and abusive. Most armies try to weed out people like that, but they can't get them all. I hope that one result of this affair is that the Army tightens up on screening who goes into MP units.

[cutedeadgirl.livejournal.com]

I'm finnish. And occasionally frustrated by my limited vocabulary, I can't always say things as I would like to when it comes to more difficult subjects.

[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!